AMERICAN CHAMELEON: THE LIVING INSTALLMENTS (2.0)
American Chameleon: The Living Installments (2.0) is a hybrid multimedia living artwork, instigated by Nigerian-American artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, that explores the ever-evolving ways in which digitality intersects with the fugitive realities and shapeshifting principles that Black queer people employ to survive and heal. The work also operates as a digital archive, a porous public performance in interactive pedagogy where Kosoko and collaborators seek to locate a space for healing both online and off. Kosoko and collaborators will host a series of events, including a film screening, discussion, and healing session, that aims to hold grief while also centering themes of liveness, beauty, humor, care, and joy.
The work operates as a flexible, digital commons. A pop-up community of organizers and practitioners who center adaptive interactive learning as a means of creating sustainable, multi-tiered networks of care. Occurring, in part, on the gaming platform Discord, The Living Installments server features the voices of mayfield brooks, Nile Harris, Kosoko, and others. This is an experiment in creating a flexible space where Black voices feel comfortable thinking and speaking out loud. It’s a virtual venue for biomythographic* liveness conjuring chameleonic possibility and entanglement.
*“Biomythography” refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982, which combines history, biography, and myth, and holds a literary perspective that serves as a guiding light for complex narrative storytelling rooted in a queer, Black self-defined, feminist imagination.
Previous Installments:
September 21, 2020 - International Day of Peace
Presented by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art & FringeArts. More details
August 23, 2020 - International Day of Remembrance
Tanz im August, in collaboration with Zürcher Theater Spektakel. More details
April 22, 2020 - Earth Day
Presented by EMPAC, New York Live Arts, and Wexner Center for the Arts. More details
Featuring: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Nile Harris, Everett-Asis Saunders, Meena Murugesan, Vanessa Eileen Thompson, Ebony Noelle Golden, and Brenda Dixon Gottschild.
ASL and closed captioning provided. More details