Installations
Photo by West
Cyclical Navigations: In the In Between
Cyclical Navigations: In the In Between (2021-2022) is an interdisciplinary installation that takes the audience on a nonlinear journey of time through memory, storytelling, movement, and location.
This work conceptualizes storytelling as a practice of embodied memory recollection, that aids in the navigation of cyclical temporalities in the ‘present’, or what I have termed the ‘In Between.’
The ‘In Between’ is the space between and within history and the contemporary. It is the liminal space that exists between an Afropessimist reality and an Afrofuturist practice. Throughout this installation storytelling acts as the navigation tool necessary orient within and move through the displayed oral interviews and somatic movement practices.
Cyclical Navigations: In the In Between considers what is possible if Black history, and thus Black stories, are treated with care through the valuing of Black bodies and voices, both living and deceased. It interrogates what happens when land is viewed as a container that holds the stories of those who are and were, and what happens when we acknowledge what and who was while inscribing what and who is into space.
Pictured: Alyah Baker, Ayan Felix, and Juliett Irving
Photos by: Lee Edwards
Installed at Duke University 2022, CADD Conference at Duke University (2022), Radicle Lovers Group Exhibition at Perfect Lovers (2024)
Now or Then: Strange Fruit Film
Originally, a live performance created for Evita Colon’s project “Speak to My Soul” (Philly, 2017), later transformed into a site-specific dance film in 2018; this piece pays homage to victims of lynching’s across the United States.
Part of of the film is recorded in Coatesville, PA near where Zachariah Walker was lynched on August 13, 1911. During the filming in Coatesivlle we were harassed by a local person, threatened with police intervention, and forced to disperse. The remainder of the film was recorded at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. At the time of this recording the most recent reported lynching was that of Danye Jones, age 24 in Missouri on October 17, 2018.
In October 2020 the piece was remixed with new editing and a new sound score sparked by the first Presidential Debate between 45 and Joe Biden. This remix, comments on the repetitive public consumption of Black death, and the normalization of Black life being politicized rather than humanized. The film along with three prints from the piece were on display.
Pictured: Lee Edwards, Nyasha George, and Desiree Lovett
Photos by The Wassaic Project
Original Filming and Editing by Jasmine Lynea
Remix Editing by Lee Edwards
Installed at All Out/All In (2020) at The Wassaic Project
Witness: Neither Here nor There
An exploration of Black existence within spiritual and earthly realms through land investigation and acknowledgement in collaboration with Nyugen Smith.
Filming locations: Duke Campus Farm, formerly Couch property where enslaved Africans labored on the stolen land of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. Wassaic, a hamlet of Amenia, New York. Saint George parish in Central Barbados.
Funding for this video was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts 2020
Pictured: Nyugen Smith and Lee Edwards
Installed at Maxon Mills at The Wassic Project