video (2018)
black : fact is a meditation on the radical capaciousness of black flesh. Here, blackness stays in motion, evades containment, and troubles the inscriptions between things. Using the semi colon as punctuation, this short video essay takes up black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers conception of ungendered flesh.
Flesh is not a site of the contained body, able to be managed disciplined, or measured. Instead flesh, troubles this boundary between things. It disrupts where you think you begin and I end. As the video plays, different markers of encoded language are placed on either side of the semi colon, provoking the viewer to make an associative connection between the left and the right side. These linguistic transitions begin to move faster and faster until the comparative logic falls out of time with the ticking clock and breaks down showing the limit of trying to contain or subjugate blackness into being knowable and measurable. This highlights the unsettling work that blackness does in showing beautiful ways to live otherwise, beyond normative performances of gender, sexuality, body, family, self, and nation.
This work pushes back against the ways that visual art often seeks to capture blackness, emphasizing the body as an exotic place, a place to purge, to covet, to dominate, to desire.
Spillers, H. J. 1987. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.