Afrovoidism Glossary
or villain origin story
Greetings spora new and familiar.
Some of you may be familiar with The Afrovoid from keeping up with my visual art. In lieu of my upcoming talk/card game on Afrovoidism with Jazsalyn and Terence Nance at Pioneer Works July 1, I want to offer some vocab and context for its beginning. This could read as an abbreviated villain origin story. The Afrovoid is a fictive ecology and portal to some primordial cosmos. In its obscurity and high grass is where fugitivity is located. The void’s illegible breadth becomes a material–becomes an identity– abundant with possibility. Vulgar like a forest floor, void is mothering. I present this meta theory as a way to trade romanticized violence and identity politics for nucleus poetics which might seed our imaginations with collective determination. I hope this first version of an Afrovoid Glossary might invite our worlds to meet up.
[The] Afrovoid[ism]: a destination and train of thought which considers the contradictory immortality of Black life. It exists on the spectrum of immortality as dignified–every genre of music created by Black America– and a wish gone wrong: a viral death.
voidthot|voidth0t|VOIDTHOT|void thought: a persona and a category for relating race, gender, desire, abundance and obscurity based on Black femme intuition and lineal wisdom. hyper/satirical/posessed femme fatale. (captured in movement by Mari and Leah in video below)
Afrospora: a descendant of The African Diaspora.
spora: a universal descriptor for all elemental based life. carbon as the most colloquial.
Afrovoidsim was an arrival point from my undergraduate thesis, NO WOMB NO REAPER (NWNR). No life, no death. If you’ve been with me since anabiosiz, you may know suspended animation as the predecessor to void thought. Seven years later, I am evermore immersed in the infintasma. I feel infinity as a phantom lurking before and beyond the split which is our present moment. This undercurrent was found as I made myself familiar with academia’s express effort to use erasure to perpetuate racism–all under the guise of white innocence. Feeling this time river provided an explanation for how Black life came to be in the Western world. I reflected on my own mother wounds and interrupted gestation of my people. Within a historical (and present day) context of being stolen from ancestral homes, and on the personal level of both my parents experiencing the gruesome loss or estrangement of a parent by the ages of 5 and 12.
I was unaware of the details of my dad’s childhood or my maternal grandmother’s demise when I wrote NWNR, which speaks to grief’s inheritance. This torch makes me feel like paper some days, but it is also a link to intuition and audacity. Learning how to hold impossible truths has motivated a sensual balance between theory and practice. This measure would not be possible without acknowledging how often langauge fails, especially the one I am writing and speaking in. This May, In pursuit of a [grand]mother tongue (Dominican Kwéyòl), I took a 3-part Haitian Creole class at The
with Wynnie Lamour– founder of The Haitian Creole Language Institute of New York. Among the radicalizing facts the world needs to know about Haiti is that Creole was created by enslaved West Africans from different regions and languages taking the vocabulary of their French colonizers and putting a West African twist on it. I am obsessed with the life ways and death rights protected by the triumph of the human spirit.
During NWNR’s conception, part of this exploration had to do with seeking to prove something to The School of Visual Arts, where I studied photography and visual critical studies (VCS). I went into school expecting to be exposed to a range of art throughout human history. While my mom skipped rent sometimes to pay for school, I thought “surely I will be offered skills and knowledge which support my interest in Black art and scholarship.” It did not take long to realize how mediocre the standard for arts education is. How limited a private institutions scope of worthiness can be. I spent a lot of undergrad highlighting these lapses in transparency, competence, and effort– how it all transpired to perpetuate institutional racism. In 2017, I collaborated with artist, activist, and VCS alum Shellyne Rodriguez to produce 1Erasure by Exclusion: How Art Schools and Institutions Uphold White Supremacy.
Enter The Afrovoid as a means to dismantle the impulse to keep laboring for systems that don’t give a fuck about me–that play dumb about reparations and continue to invest in genocide. Fugitivity is vulnerable to rejection, isolation, and an impoverished sense of self worth–but most of all when you rely on a system that wants to kill you. The Afrovoid’s boundless disassimilation is independent of captivity, but it is a thread. Perhaps paradox is relative and nature’s only identity is change. When we embody change, there is freedom in abstraction.
i am 19 and really had to pee