To Dream A More Liveable Place…
A Performance in Anticipation of…
This work is an exploration of how one might be in space and be in time after a rupture. It considers being and taking up space while being variously marked in the negative against the image of the subject, thinking about how such being becomes an act of contestation against negation. It is a multilayered meditation on alienation and claiming home. I think about the various oscillations of this refusal against refusal, considered within and beyond human centric temporal horizons. The piece works to tackle the historic and ongoing ruptures that dislocate black bodies from being: belonging in space, in time, in History.
I think about a woman known by the name of Sara who finds that she has lost hr grounding, the earth beneath her feet having been ripped away. She boards a ship that takes her across oceans to lands that, though distant, are still a place on earth.
The installation consists of 4 still moving images composed of life-scale still portraits reminiscent of portrait images from the 20th century in South Africa overlaid with videos of the process of sitting for the portrait [“Portrait of a native with pretensions of grandeur [or] A performance in anticipation of [another world].
