Panel Discussion—Afila.si: Black Experience isn’t a Spectacle

Printed Matter, Inc.

A presentation and conversation about the online project "Afila.si: Black Experience Isn't a Spectacle"

afila.si [æfilæsi] is a collective digital library anchored in Afro-centered perspectives of history, with aims to fortify the accessibility of these cultural productions through fact-based notes about the othered. In 2020, afila.si organized an exhibition titled Black Experience isn’t a Spectacle, which explored the legacy of the voyeuristic gaze in visual representations of the Black body.In this discussion, curator Venessa Appiah, designer Jesse Katabarwa, and publisher Harley Smart of Anteism Books discuss the context of this exhibition, its iteration as a special online project for Printed Matter + EXILE Books at NADA Miami, and the ways in which the website functions as a repository and resource for the study of Black radical thought. Venessa Appiah is an Africanist researcher and curator specializing in theoretical understandings within the disciplines of African Studies, Film/ Visuality Studies and Art History. Her graduate studies examine representations of eroticism in Sub-Saharan African cinema. Having worked for the National Gallery of Canada to grassroot independent initiatives, her curatorial practice engages with cultural productions ranging from pre-colonial era to post-digital crypto art.Jesse Katabarwa is a visual artist who wields image and literary sequencing as a means to generate and excavate living narratives. His works expose the paradoxes and fractures embedded in the contemporary experiences of what is deemed the “other”.Harley Smart is co-founder of arts publishing company Anteism Books and is operator of the commercial bookbindery BookArt inc.  As a graduate student within Concordia University’s Design and Computation Arts,  his research explores how machine intelligence may transform independent publishing practices.  He enjoys working with artists, writers, designers and researchers to produce thoughtful, interdisciplinary, and challenging new bookworks, installations, and other markers of progressive, contemporary culture.

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Panel Discussion—Afila.si: Black Experience isn’t a Spectacle

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Panel Discussion—Afila.si: Black Experience isn’t a Spectacle

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