“In this film series and book (There Are Black People In The Future) we will begin with Lefebvre’s spatial turn then re-center visual geographies to incorporate what Katherine McKittrick calls “black geographies.” We are considering how to create a language that re-imagines the body as land and as a corporeal topography.

Our interpolation into a landscape not our own constitutes this continuous agitation of one body (the human flesh, corporeal body) against another (the body of land). In this series we will be exploring when we negotiate land what this means in relation to Blackness— how is Blackness instantiated—how is it performed, formed, how does it gesture and how does the Black body become circumambient to land and vice versa?

Using a series of different visual material, we will delve into what dislocation looks like for the Black body.”

Films T and 1968 < 2018 > 2068
Keisha Rae Witherspoon
A film crew follows three grieving participants of Miami’s annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model R.I.P. T-shirts and innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead. T screened at Sundance Film Festival 2020, won audience award for best short film at both BlackStar and New Orleans film festivals, and went on to win the Golden Bear for best short film at Berlinale 2020.
1968<2018>2068 is a meditation on cyclical time theory and the recurring shadows that lie within our collective memory. The working film premiered at the Schmidt Center Gallery as part of the 2018 South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual & Media Artists Fellowship Exhibition, and in 2019 at MoMA PS1 for the inaugural Black Women’s Film Conference with New Negress Film Society.

A New England Document
Che Applewhaite
Drawing on ethnographic methods, critical theory and aesthetic techniques of essay film and contemporary Black cinema, A New England Document is a speculative documentary film that reconstructs the impulse of these two ethnographers’ photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, against their exclusionary aesthetic categories of White humanity. Using found footage with selected images and text almost exclusively, Applethwaite enacts an afro-fabulative performance of his formerly silenced perspective, with their daughter, New-York-Times-bestselling writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. We give voice in fragmentary counterpoint to her family’s particular manifestations of New England’s noblesse oblige Whiteness, edited upon the haunting sounds of archival ghosts.

Flâneuse
Nan Collymore
Grounded in the idea of what Baudelaire described as the “flâneur”—here the shoe is used as a conceit for the true flâneur—the flâneuse— to use as mode of transport.The shoe, captured in both still and active moments is positioned as an emblematic symbol by which to decipher those elements and to discover the ground upon which those streets reside.

Children of Nan
Alisha B. Wormsley
Grounded in the idea of what Baudelaire described as the “flâneur”—here the shoe is used as a conceit for the true flâneur—the flâneuse— to use as mode of transport.The shoe, captured in both still and active moments is positioned as an emblematic symbol by which to decipher those elements and to discover the ground upon which those streets reside.

Programmed by Nan Collymore.

Join in for a virtual screening and conversation on Saturday, April 24th, 2pm pst / 5pm est.

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_N4yz8lucRZ2a35gpv3ZwCg

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