Black Archive Fever

  • Date: February 18, 2022
  • Time: 10:00 am—11:30 am
  • Location: Video Production Studio
  • Speakers
  • Moderator/s

“Shattering Representation: Digital Visual Effects and Bone-Breaking Black Dance”

Kerry-Ann James

This essay provokes the stability of space, time, and the ‘Black’ in Black representation. 

The notion of a persistent bodily suspension and corporeal shattering through digital visual effects in cinematic dance performance opposes long‐standing aspirations for authentic filmic representations of Blackness. Through study of Barnaby Roper’s short film, The First Day (2020) and Hiro Murai’s, Black Man in a White World (2016) the terms of space, time and personhood are addressed as untameable, denoting a shared aesthetic of refusal and a move towards generative visualizations and understandings of Black performance in film. Along these lines, drawing primarily on Franz Fanon’s theory of self-fragmentation and Thomas F. DeFrantz on black performance theory, this essay pulls connections between the historical employment of Black dance as an archival practice, a tool of resistance, and pleasure. This essay emphasizes the potentials of incorporating digital visual effects to foreground the instability of racial identities and toward an alternative ground of connectivity. This essay argues that the suspension and shattering of Black performers’ bodies in film prolongs diasporic and linguistic potentials that are in service to collective dialogues. Finally, this essay ruminates on how The First Day and Black Man in a White World play with collective memory, extending across the African diaspora, and spacetime while asking what might embracing digital self-destruction mean to playing with racial representation.

ACT: The Black Women’s Performance Wikipedia Project

Mel Harper

Some of the most impactful, relevant, and powerful conceptual performance artworks being created today are by artists whose names are not known to the wider art world. The documentation of these performances may be ephemeral, and their digital media footprint minimal or piecemeal. By designating an action as their work of art rather than an object, the artist optimizes the experience of the work for viewers present when and where the action takes place. Any documentation of the performance: photographs, video, artifacts, or oral history—no matter how superb—are mere echoes of the action itself, each growing fainter the further removed they are from the performance.

This fall and winter, I’ll be conducting research—in the form of interviews and traveling to experience live performances—about black women performance artists, and to weave that primary research with any online resources about the artists to create Wikipedia entries for each. An entry on Wikipedia is of vital importance to an artist’s visibility in the digital age. Wikipedia entries are often the first search engine result when you Google an artist’s name. Wikipedia is one of the most trusted sources globally for general background information on a subject or person. 

The statistics regarding women in general on Wikipedia are disheartening. Only 17% of all biographical Wikipedia entries are written about women, and only 10% of Wikipedia authors are women. It will take many Wikipedia authors and concerted pushes to correct this dearth in the presence of women on Wikipedia; my research project is only one such attempt. To focus my research, I will create Wikipedia entries about black women performance artists—a subject with which have specialized expertise, having assisted in producing conceptual performances for the past nine years. I’ve titled the project “ACT,” based on my developing definition of performance art, as well as the idea that one must act to correct societal and scholarly disparities. 

Because of the sprawling, interconnected nature of Wikipedia entries, the full scale and scope of my project could expand and emerge in ways I cannot fully conceive of; however, here are a few artists I plan to create Wikipedia entries for (and for which entries do not currently exist): Ebony Golden, Tsedaye Makonnen, Ada Pinkston, Nicoletta Darita de la Brown, Janae Williams (Juh), and Taja Lindley. As I gather materials and information through the research, with individual artists’ consent, I will create a repository of digitized materials (photographs, videos, artifacts, recorded oral histories) documenting the performances I witness and interviews I conduct with the ultimate goal of increasing visibility for practicing black women performance artists.

This presentation would serve as a part two to a paper I presented Black Portraiture[s] II in 2015, “Performative Code Switching:  Black Women, Conceptual Performance, and Fluid Identity.” Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions about my application. It would be an honor to be selected to present my research at Black Portraiture[s] VII.

The Meta-Archive: A Place to Play

Ricky Weaver

In a society of surveillance we have internalized constantly being observed. French Philosopher, Michel Foucout argues that the embodiment of the panopticon “reshapes the soul” and renders bodies docile and more productive for capitalism. The only way to not be watched is to be unseen. Historically, we have responded to the illegibility of marginalized folks by increasing representation. I want to investigate another frequency of resistance. Simone Brown writes about necessary undersights in the flight to freedom as acts of “Dark sousveillance”. As artists we sometimes code our work to make some information necessarily inaccessible to a broad audience and directly in conversation with a specific group. Sometimes, what is perceived as an encryption is a necessary undersight. The Meta-Archive is a term I’ve inserted into the Neuro-Linguistic Communication model to name the unwatched space that is the location where the coded information resides. It is a space in which we are able to shape our realities without our images being co-opted and commodified. It is a place where we are alleviated from the performance of being observed. It is a space to play. 

This paper will define Meta-archive through the language of the Neuro-linguistic programming guide in conversation with the work of theorists and scholars such as Simone Browne, Arthur Jaffa and Tina Campt. I will discuss the archive as it relates to surveillance and frequencies of resistance through art work.


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