Responding to calls for heightened attention and attunement to the multiple shapes of Black life, this set explores the politics of seeing and listening in Black culture within the context of quotidian experience. Centrally, the set considers alternatives for characterizing the meaning and shape of Black creation beyond essentially demonstrative performance and grapples with how Black people continue to work, think, play, imagine, and survive amidst the crisis and reality of anti-Black environments.
We gather to interrogate and study ways of “reading” and “perceiving” the Black subject, casting aside the outermost layers of aesthetics to access different optic and sonic registers of engagement; to reveal what Tina Campt refers to as “forms of quiet unsayability that exceeds words, sounds, and utterances”[1].
Dr. Geri Augusto and Ihab Balla introduce us to the theme, Perceptive Knowledge, with their interrogation of the gaze and consideration of alternative methods of seeing, “reading”, and interpreting Black expressive forms. Dr. Ola Mohammed and Anique Jordan underscore the liberating, eruptive potential and future of Black sound in public space. Michael McMillan and Trevor Mathison explore what it means to work with, remix, and recreate sonic formations.
This set is a careful consideration of Afrodiasporic practices and stories that provide opportunities to interpret rhythms, patterns, and various frequencies differently, as we embrace synesthesia, intuition, contemplation, and improvisation in the stasis of Black life’s everyday orders.
[1] Campt, T. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press. 5.
GERI AUGUSTO & IHAB BALLA IN CONVERSATION (featuring Melaine Ferdinand-King)
In this hour-long conversation, Geri Augusto and Ihab Balla, present and discuss their current in-progress photographic and cinematic works. Augusto’s photo essay, “Historical Spaces - Hierarchical Gods: Diasporic Worship Series” traces sacral and fugitive practices in Bahia, Brazil , while Balla’s film teaser, Practice, and photo series Topography of Disquiet, explore the challenge of engaging with and witnessing images of Black women and children in Brooklyn, NY. (U.S.) and Melbourne (Australia). This set asks the questions: What does it mean to facilitate one’s own terms of engagement? What are the aesthetic impulses behind entering (or withdrawing) from the terrain of “being seen”? Curator Melaine Ferdinand-King joins them as audience and moderator.
Geri Augusto is a longtime scholar and former activist at the intersection between the politics of knowledge, knowledge practices, creative expression, and struggles for equality and justice in unequal, highly diverse societies and communities. Her interests include subjugated knowledge, global Black radicalism, colonial sciences, higher education transformation, science and technology policy, and visual arts. Her most recent work spans Brazil, the U.S., and South Africa.
Ihab Balla is an anti-disciplinary artist and educator based in Melbourne, Australia. Across and against disciplines, mediums, and compositions, they are concerned with the atomistic and quotidian practices of Black subjectivities.
DR. OLA MOHAMMED & ANIQUE JORDAN IN CONVERSATION
In this conversation, Dr. Ola Mohammed and Anique Jordan reflect on the role of Afro-Caribbean sound in shaping Black culture in Toronto, Canada as well as its influence on their personal upbringings and original creative, scholarly, and archive-derived works. Throughout their virtual convening, Mohammed and Jordan give consideration to how Black sound functions as a sense-making tool and a distinctly organic articulation of space and community, using Mohammed’s theory of The Black Nowhere and Jordan’s highly-acclaimed artistic works as points of departure. Their discussion extends itself as both a listening session of selected songs from the Toronto sound scene as well as a meditation on black noise as informed by their shared knowledge of the city’s rhythms, gestures, and intergenerational histories.
Ola Mohammed is an Assistant Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Humanities Department at York University. Her research is in the areas of Black Studies, Black Popular Music, Sound Studies and Diaspora Studies. She specializes in interdisciplinary research exploring Black cultural production, Black social life and Black being as sites of possibility.
Anique Jordan is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, writer, curator and entrepreneur known for her work in photography, sculpture, and performance. Her artwork challenges historical narratives, reinterpreting the past in order to develop a vision of the future.
MICHAEL MCMILLAN & TRVEOR MATHISON IN CONVERSATION
Michael McMillan & Trevor Mathison broadcast their experiences as sonic practitioners in their conversation on Black sonic technologies and oral traditions. Thinking on radiograms, turntables, and record players, McMillan and Mathison discuss how further attention to the ethos of sound systems and the spirit of amplification can help tap into alternative frequencies of engagement and new modes of voicing the oft-unheard, Black experience.
Michael McMillan is a London based writer, playwright, artist/curator and academic, known for his critically acclaimed installation-based exhibition, The West Indian Front Room, which was the Geffrye Museum’s successful exhibition (2005-06). He is currently an associate lecturer in Cultural & Historical Studies at London College of Fashion (UAL), and research associate with VIAD at University of Johannesburg.
Trevor Mathison is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, sound designer, and founding member of The Black Audio Film Collective . His sonic practice centers in creating fractured haunting aural landscapes and integrating existing music has featured in over thirty award-winning films.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Tina Campt, Listening to Images (2017) - read the introduction here
Kevin Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet (2012) - read Quashie’s Q&A on his book here
Singing and Music: Bringing People Together- SNCC Digital Gateway - access the transcripts here
