UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art – förlag

“Campbell shifts the epistemic ground, the color and desires forsound, and in such shifting makes us ask questions about where wethought we were, where we might be when thinking through lm,where lm might take us if we have the courage to join in a practiceof uncertainty and hiddenness and relax our anxieties about what itmeans to make meaning and allow for immersive experience.”—Ashon CrawleyIn this volume, writer/scholar Ashon Crawley and artist Crystal Z Campbell explore the ways in which fragments and gaps in the archive can act as historical conductors, offering new approaches to Black geography, land and body, and the public secrets embedded in landscapes. What is the relationship between remembering and forgetting? Is the sonic a way to get at the archive and what exceeds its capture? Contributions consider the place of the un- translatable, of strategies of opacity, and of rumor in and beyond Campbell’s experimental documentary work.

“Since 1995 Theo Jean Cuthand has produced roughly thirty-five video works, often informed by a queer D.I.Y. tradition, and often departing from the first person. In these works, he frequently positions himself with extensive “I am …” statements, yet these statements aren’t meant to construct a static identity—they hold specific ties with a kind of non – linear time that is in contact with Indigenous ancestry as much as it responds to questions of locality. In regard to intersecting vectors of oppression, it is usually presumed that the various aspects of a person’s identity are stable, and that their specific intersections can be analyzed along solid markers of belonging such as class, race, gender, ability, and so forth. These notions become profoundly destabilized when reconsidered through Cuthand’s prolific practice. In their generosity, his video works offer deep insights into the necessarily unfinished business of building, understanding, and negotiating one’s own sense of identity.”—Vika Kirchenbauer