BLACK BODY AMNESIA: LIVE
Premiering in 2022, Black Body Amnesia (the performance reading) examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people that negotiate psychic and spiritual lifewords that exist beyond the captive conditions induced by racially reductive renderings of the African American body. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of virtual doulas including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, DJ Maij, Nile Harris, KJ Wade with sound composition by Everett-Asis Saunders.
In this new work, kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a theatrical device manifesting within the construction of the alternate ego J-Lov. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests. Black Body Amnesia attempts to archive ongoing acts and while re-activating histories of black collaborative action, we find personal narratives of freedom that subvert culturally-charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.
Rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care, Black Body Amnesia continues kosoko’s engagement in public and performative scholarship. It is a communal act of public study in which the whole process is made visible.
The performance of Black Body Amnesia follows 2020’s Chameleon (The Living Installments), which repurposed the online social platform Discord as an interactive venue where the artist hosted audio transmissions of original sound footage from a new moving-image work, a multi-media zine, remote conversations, a somatic workshop, and an archive of images, videos, and links. Many of the theories and documents from this event find themselves in Black Body Amnesia, now staged (as an in person or virtual transmission art work offering a deeper embodied experience for both the spectator and performers.
In addition to the performance work, Black Body Amnesia is also being shared as a book (available now) and as a living web-based archive which host documentation of the multiple iterations of the work serving as a public research hub, and as a repository for definitions of Black love.
Funding: The creation of Black Body Amnesia: LIVE was supported by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the Wexner Center for the Arts; Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program; Dance/NYC Advancement Fund; and Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF), a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the Pew Fellowship in the Arts; and The Hinterlands Residency, Detroit.