Dirt, soil, earth, mud, clay, and sand all describe the culmination of many grains into what tethers us to our celestial body. We can build kinship to the body of the land though acceptance of our unification with the dirt while we are still able to feel it pass through our hands. I’ve explored this message through videos and performances like Miraculous Object Subjectivity, Primordihoe, and (something about assimilation). These works are performed within VOIDTHOT: a persona and a category for relating race, gender, abundance and obscurity. As the Afrovoid mediates the association between blackness and void, VOIDTHOT embodies the paradox of a cultural identity manifested in dissonance with human necessity.
Thot is joyous; thot is vilified. Thot is navigating (over there). That hoe is the mother of improvisation. The inheritor of jazz and thirst trap oracle. VOIDTHOT is desire and its shadow. In theory, VOIDTHOT describes an archetypal afrospora in 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. Seeking escape from the purgatory of cultural terror, VOIDTHOT enters the Afrovoid. The Afrovoid is a multiverse of personal and shared histories of the African Diaspora. Like time, it merges, collapses, lurches forward, and appears to stand still. Like afrospora (the inhabitants), it radiates extremes for black survival. It is a cosmic Black unity; demystifying the occupied, uninhabitable oasis of America. I’m also thinking of a primordial glacial oasis, like the one Ludacris takes a swig of. What is the correlation between the end of permafrost and the end of history? What happens when we regard compost as elder?
at 2:02 Nina Simone describes freedom as “no fear”
Every Graveyard is A Garden (EGG) is a poetic synthesis of 1Life/Death/Life cycles. It is about how the beginning becomes the end, then new again. EGG speculates beyond and before the 2Plantationcene; suggesting an awakening submerged in the hidden or unknown. 3Dark Scenes from the Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene describes the Plantationcene’s influence on earthlings:
According to Donna Haraway, the Plantationocene is a way of conceptualizing the planetary impacts of the exploitation of natural resources, monoculture expansion, and forcible labor. These practices began in the 1600s and have underpinned modernity, climate change, and ecological destruction. The impacts of these structures have unevenly affected various populations and regions, with the Global South being the area that has suffered from the worst exploitation of extractive practices, environmental damage, and coercive work.
I’m interested in how liberal democracy/capitalism disrupts this cycle and lays waste to life on Earth. EGG is an interdisciplinary vehicle for the splitting of land, creation of River, and crawl of vegetation to tell a story about the succulence of rupture. What slips through the shell of old versions? I think EGG is what’s slipping through the dissolving ism of Afrovoidism. Frameworks have their place but mainly act as containers of the uncontainable, guarding it from methods elusive to [visual]language. The feeling of the exposed membrane of a world healing its relationship to death might be shared most vividly by sonic collaborations or a stew kissed by zesty labneh. I’m leaving you with a playlist of the music inspiring EGG. I think it’s a nice one to stretch to.
P.S embrace the sloppy footnotes
Pinkola Estes, Clarissa. Women Who Run with the Wolves
Haraway, Donna. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1: 159–165. note: colonialism and its extractive methods start as early as the 15th century