Coda: As Told by the Living*- Day 2
Overview
Coda: As Told by the Living* is a colloquium that completes the speculative triptych that began with Prelude: Venus Lives and continued with Act 3: As Visible as Blood. Together, these projects trace and dissect the afterlives of the Black Venus, foregrounding the intimacies, violences, and possibilities of Black femme sexuality.
Bringing together the voices of emerging thinkers alongside established scholars—those whose voices are often confined within the institution, yet whose imaginations exist elsewhere—Coda: As Told by the Living* establishes itself as an exercise in what Christina Sharpe names a Black annotation of life in the wake.
Through the words, performances, and gestures of Semilore Sobande, Keisha Scarville, Rebecca Bair, Kariyana Calloway-Scott, Zuri Arman, Zalika U. Ibaorimi, Hunter Shackelford, Kimberly Bain, Abena Somiah, Fatima Jamal, Idaresit Thompson, and Adeerya Johnson, we are confronted with a lingering question, a whisper, an intervention, and a continuation; an insistence on the interiority of Black being against a dominant imaginary of mistranslation, erasure, and objectification.
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Highlights
- 5 hours
- In person
- Doors at 12:30 PM
Location
825 Pacific St #700
825 Pacific Street
#700 Vancouver, BC V6Z 1C3 Canada
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Black Femme Archives for Another Time Somewhere Nearby
The quandary of the archive lives in those of us who care for remnants and remains, especially when we center lives and deaths deemed marginal and thus central to the archive’s power. These traces expose the gap between its promises and its practices: the archive offers possibility yet enacts state-sanctioned negation. It can hold abundance while still enabling erasure. Its capacity to contain both poison and antidote pushes some of us toward madness or what Jennifer Morgan calls “scholarly induced malady.” Between madness and malady—on the edge of breakthrough and breakdown—lies Black femme practice in the archive. Black femme alchemy for another time somewhere nearby is a poethetical invitation into the submerged convergences of Black femme archiving: obsession, multiples, mess, invention. Through five case studies, I follow these practices, drawn less by theory than by obsessive closeness to image, sound, word, and sensation.
Tongues Tied Up
The Tongues Tied Up Continued portion of my work for Act III: As Visible As Blood serves as an incantation for my ongoing exploration of the sermonic solo woman. It extends my concept of “resecularization,” which rearticulates the erotic and sensual currents embedded in religious ritual, particularly within the Black church, a site that holds both spiritual practice and the afterlives of the Southern sex economy. Influenced by Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the “pest house,” I approach the church as sanctuary and contagion, where bodies like mine, our mothers’, and our grandmothers’ move between Venus and the woman at the podium. Using my own body as subject and situator, I trace the iterative vanishing of Venus, how she grows skinnier through the world’s reading of fat Black flesh. This work becomes theory and invocation, reframing the porno-sensual within Black sacred life.
Title (TBA)
Organized by
Gallery Gachet
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