CHAMELEON

Chameleon is an experimental visual album inspired by the radical queer feminist genre of the “Biomythography” which refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982. It 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.

Broken into five distinct confessional/autobiographical poems: Linoleum, Stank, Entertainer, Wake, Effigy (all written by kosoko); each poem acts as a chapter depicting and rewriting specific moments from the protagonist's lived experience. In each shot, kosoko's body responds to memory, moving in and out of dream, nightmare, present practice and ceremony. The process––a necessary re-conjuring––allows past ghosts to exist alongside present reconfigurations underscoring the creative, therapeutic and sometimes necessary but painful impulses of fugitive beings to shape-shift as a measure of survival.

Funding: The creation of Chameleon 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.