Cycle 1
Posted: November 5, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Cycle 1 went really well, and I am very excited to continue working on this project. My work centers Black women and moves from Black women at large in the lives of my audience to my own specific experience as a Black woman.
I was very intentional about wanting to craft an environment in the MOLAB, so I used the white scrims to create a circle in the middle of the room onto which I projected my video. However, before the participants could enter the space, they were met with my “Thank a Black Woman” station, which invited them to thank a Black woman by name that is in their own lives or give a thank you to Black women at large. They had the option to speak their thank you into the microphone that was set up, write the woman’s name on a sticky note and post it to the poster board that was set up on the table, or do both. Once they had recorded their thank you, they could enter the space.
I used an updated version of my patch from PP3 to capture the audio from the recording (whoops, I switched the camera to movie to be completely manual and forgot to enter the patch right at the top) and so they could see the flashes of the shapes and colors moving on the walls of the circle they stood inside of. After everyone said their thank you and entered the space, the play back of the voiced thank you’s played. This moment was very meaningful; everyone stood in the space along the outside edges making a circle and listened to each other. It was very powerful to hold space for Black women in this way… for women who are too often over looked to be given their flowers for once.
The next scene of the patch is meant to be a “Black women at home” segment, showing me and my mom doing things like washing and doing our hair (often a shared experience between Black mother’s and daughters across the globe) and caring for ourselves and our homes. I don’t have that footage yet so I was unable to show. However, I plan to bring in some physical objects into the space that will be connected to a Makey Makey to open and close circuits to switch between various video feeds.
The last scene speaks to me and my Black womanhood most specifically and is a 3 minute clip of a movement exploration of a research I am calling “ancestral crossings” in which I seek to bring about a kinesthetic shift to spirit through movement in order to shift the temporal planes between past and present so that I might commune with my ancestors once again. The last minute includes a pre-recorded spoken text narrated by me. The audience spread out and watched as the video was played on the the three individual scrims. They commented on the texture of having to watch my movement through another person.
As the video came to a close, everyone settled again onto the periphery, further solidifying the circularity of the space which felt important to me as circles and circularity carry a great deal of meaning in Black culture and life across the diaspora. The feedback I received was really spectacular. I was particularly interested to know how the “Thank a Black Woman” station would be received, and it was exciting to hear that my classmates wanted that moment to go on for even longer. I’m now considering ways to incorporate more by perhaps pre-recording the some thank you to have playing in the background intermittently throughout the third scene.
It was an immense pleasure to have another Black woman in the room when I presented, as we are who I do my work for. Sage Crump of Complex Movements, a Detroit based artists collective that was in residency at ACCAD last week came to visit with our class after she heard about the work that we were doing. It was an honor and a privilege to be in her presence and to hear her thoughts on not only my own work, but also that of my classmates. Thank you for your time and energy, Sage.
You can listen to the thank you’s at the download link below.