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CURATION

Ineffable Blaze

Trinity Square Video

11 January - 03 March 2018

Kiera Boult, Jazmine VK Carr, Danièle Dennis, Dainesha Nugent-Palache and Marcelline Mandeng

 

Texts by Aurel Haize-Odogbo and Jared Brown

Performance by Marcelline Mandeng and Kim Ninkuru

Documentation: Ineffable Blaze, Trinity Square Video, 2018. Photos: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Ineffable Blaze meditates on the exhaustive labours of self-articulation that cast the Black femme subject as dispossessed. Their subjectivity is an untraceable spectre. Their Blackness vibrates within the splits of a social system designed to keep its force at the fibril margins. Black femme subjects are constantly compelled to imagine, self-define, and then externalize their existence. Why must they envision the possibility of their own livelihoods, and then engage in the additional labour of translation?

As if humanity for the Black femme were a dream.

As if humanity for the Black femme were virtual.

In death and its looming shadow, the Black femme subject is flattened. In our call to cultivate safe space and self-actualize, are we ever truly free of threat or violation? Safety, softness, and joy are designated temporal glitches within the system. They glisten. Beyond the limits of the system, Black femme vulnerabilities radiate through virtual mediations. Through touch. Refusal. Loss. Through flesh encounters and landscapes of grief. What do these sites look like? These sites are not places one may easily locate, map, or demarcate. However, within these sites, women and femmes embody their Blackness, softness, and sensuality, unfolding into selves as they always and already are—unwavering.

Ineffable Blaze positions itself in defiance of self-defining as a means of actualization. In these splits and breaks, like water forcefully and resiliently weaving through earth, a network of Black femme affinity signals a futurity where they are alive – pulsating and thriving.

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