DMA Spring Review ‘21 | Leslie Foster
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 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. Onscreen, performers grapple with the materiality of their surroundings: poignant symbols for the rage, joy, and trauma of Black life.
The films are intended to be installed on screens (fabricated from acrylic sheets and treated with rear-projection paint) that will be placed across from each other, allowing viewers to move through the literal liminal space between them.
Filmed on Gabrielino-Tongva land
Cleaning Instructions
Close your eyes. Walk in tight circles.
Feed the blackness your whispers.
Invite your ancestors to dine with you.
Feed them the sound of glass bells.
Break the bells and set them on fire.
Time travel sideways.
Abandon all attempts to be human, celebrate your inhumanity.
Pull the monsters from your brain (you might need the assistance
of a friend with a good set of tools) and feed them the burnt glass.
Open your eyes, walk (reverse) in wide circles.
Become monstrous.
Content Note: Contains audio of a person in mental and emotional distress
Production Notes for Old Magic, New Fury (right side)
Performance: Lola Rose Eros (he/they)
Materials: Audio recorded by artist in Jamaica (2011), watermelon cotton candy, water, glass
To be completed:
Score (current edit uses temp music track)
Final color grade
Captions
Production Notes for Bitter Crop (left side)
Performances: Kasiemobi Udo-okoye (she/her) & Lizzie Rose (she/her)
Materials: Voicemail message from artist's archive, watermelon cotton candy
To be completed:
Captions