practice.

Broadly, my work/s center ruptures of time, vernacular, space, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being while maintaining investment in Black expression that does not seek to resolve archival erasure, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of B/blackness within and after enslavement’s legacies. Currently, I’m orchestrating a seven-movement, intertextual opera, The Architecture of Memory, whose compositions explore B/blackness, tutelage, grief, historicity, self-making, un/making, mythologizing in darkness, and intimacy in kinship. 

These [choreopoems] are polytemporal orchestrations of ‘imperative aliveness’ belonging to my manuscript’s cosmos: annotations within its operatic constellation, thereby scenic translation tools for world-building. Their blackened theatricality is a fabulative wild – ungiven, immersive; a fugitive methodology forged in the “afterlife of slavery” (Christina Sharpe) and considering the “half-life of servitude” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs). Conceived as incarnations, conjugations of maroonage and nurture, en/coded by the necessarily speculative Black maternal, itself unpromised, unbridled, cacophonous, ‘critically erotic,’ I imagine these [elsewheres] as holy, terrifying, brilliant, bloody, dissonant, emancipatory, soulful, and incomplete. As I score Sankofic matrilineal attunement, I de/tangle a grammar, a system of thought, an arrangement of ornamentation in the infinite tense = to be. Thus, each is an index for “practicing refusal” (Tina Campt), announcing forthcoming entanglements and coordinates for departure and arrival.