This Haunted Land
This Haunted Land is an experimental film diptych, which lives in the space between call and response. The piece, composed of the films Bitter Crop and Old Magic, New Fury–titles that reference Abel Meeropol’s Strange Fruit (immortalized by Billie Holiday) and Audre Lordes’ A Woman Speaks–dislodges linear temporality, slipping into a space in which generational pain and the logics of oppression are all-consuming and simultaneously rendered inert.
Old Magic references Gullah ritual in its structure, which mirrors the circling motion threaded through the film while Bitter Crop embraces a gentle, persistent sense of horror. Both films create a conceptual loop, suspended in cyclical time, a reflection of my own grappling with the underlying concepts of Afropessimism. The films, projected onto sheets of delicate Sekishu rice paper, are almost life-sized, with the intention of creating a 1-1 relationship with viewers. Instead of larger-than-life figures or miniature characters on handheld screens, the performers are rendered at a human scale, in order to provoke a discomfiting empathy. The rice paper–attached to thin, poplar beams suspended by monofilament to provide the illusion that they are floating in mid-air–adds texture to the films, enhancing their surreal affect. The full effect, including two channels of stereo audio, which serve to envelop viewers in sound, is claustrophobic and unsettling.
Both films fill the space around them with layered aural collages that incorporate diegetic sound, performances, and audio from my archives, which I recorded in 2011 during the production of an unfinished documentary, Until We Have Faces, and during my 6-year stint as a church janitor in Hollywood. The sound from one film serves to comment and foreshadow moments in the other film, in order to complete the loop in aural space a well as visual. Onscreen, performers grapple with the materiality of their surroundings: poignant symbols for the rage, joy, and trauma of Black life.
Single-channel version is available below for viewing.
Content Note: Contains audio of a person in emotional and mental distress.
Fall 2021 INSTALLATION - Perspective SliP GROUP EXHIBITion | New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles
Image by Carrie Chen
THis Haunted Land - Single Channel Version
View documentation of the entire Perspective Slip exhibition by LA Art Documents here.