AMERICAN CHAMELEON: THE LIVING INSTALLMENTS (2.0)
American Chameleon: The Living Installments, virtual performance, 2020
American Chameleon: The Living Installments (2.0) is a hybrid multimedia living artwork, instigated by Nigerian-American artist jaamil olawale kosoko, that explores the ever-evolving ways in which digitality intersects with the fugitive realities and shapeshifting principles that Black queer people employ to survive and heal. The work also operates as a digital archive, a porous public performance in interactive pedagogy where kosoko and collaborators seek to locate a space for healing both online and off. kosoko and collaborators will host a series of events, including a film screening, discussion, and healing session, that aims to hold grief while also centering themes of liveness, beauty, humor, care, and joy.
The work operates as a flexible, digital commons. A pop-up community of organizers and practitioners who center adaptive interactive learning as a means of creating sustainable, multi-tiered networks of care. Occurring, in part, on the gaming platform Discord, The Living Installments server features the voices of mayfield brooks, Nile Harris, kosoko, and others. This is an experiment in creating a flexible space where Black voices feel comfortable thinking and speaking out loud. It’s a virtual venue for biomythographic* liveness conjuring chameleonic possibility and entanglement.
*“Biomythography” refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982, which combines history, biography, and myth, and holds a literary perspective that serves as a guiding light for complex narrative storytelling rooted in a queer, Black self-defined, feminist imagination.
People
jaamil olawale kosoko (director and host)
John D. Alexander (production manager/lighting designer)
Michelle Boulé (healing session facilitator)
mayfield brooks (performer/healing session facilitator)
Ashon Crawley (interlocutor)
Ebony Noelle Golden (co-host)
Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Alyssa Gersony (research assistant)
Nile Harris (performer/systems administrator/archivist/social media/usher)
Ima Iduozee (film co-director)
Bill T. Jones (interlocutor)
Jennifer Kidwell (assistant director/artistic doula/co-host)
Autumn Knight (interlocutor)
Alexis McCrimmon (film editor)
Meena Murugesan (video projection designer)
Vadim Nickel (systems administrator/production support)
Emily Reilly (dramaturg)
Everett Asis Saunders (sound designer)
Tara Sheena (project manager)
Vanessa Eileen Thompson (interlocutor)
SaVonne N. Whitfield (wardrobe and fabrication)
Ni’Ja Whitson (interlocutor)
Peiyi Wong (co-scenic designer)
Previous Installments:
September 21, 2020 - International Day of Peace
Presented by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art & FringeArts
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August 23, 2020 - International Day of Remembrance
Presented by Tanz im August in collaboration with Zürcher Theater Spektakel
April 22, 2020 - Earth Day
Presented by EMPAC, New York Live Arts, and Wexner Center for the Arts
More details
Syllabi
Chameleon: A Syllabus for Survival
Chameleon: A Syllabus for Survival, 2020
What are the agreements, and complex systems of care needed to realize alternative methodologies for negotiating this moment of global crisis?
Is it even possible to create an invitation that portals us through such nascent space?
What are the emergent values of the new world inside which we are heading? What does it mean to educate or even create in a time of global crisis?
Syllabus for Peace
Farming While Black by Leah Penniman and the Soul Fire Farm group
Michelle Alexander and Ruby Sales Discuss ML King's Riverside Sermon
Ruby Sales, Where Does It Hurt? from the Krista Tippett: On Being Project
Audre Lorde reads Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power
Martin Luther King - I Have A Dream Speech - August 28, 1963
Holistic Lifelong Learning Model from the First Nation’s People, as presented by the Canadian Council on Learning
The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, by arundhati roy
In Search Of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose, by Alice Walker
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
"Social Justice in a time of Social Distancing” by Kenneth Bailey & Lori Lobenstine from Scalawag Magazine
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman
The Nap Ministry
Breaking Isolation: Self Care and Community Care Tools for Our People by The Audre Lorde Project
Educator Resource Guide for current nationwide uprisings from the Racial Justice Organizing Committee
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
by adrienne maree brown
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown
Tracie Keesee - How Police and the Public can Create Safer Neighborhoods Together
The United States Institute of Peace
Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu.
Translated by Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English, and Toinette Lippe. Introduction by Jacob Needleman.
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police by Mariame Kaba
The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The 1619 Project from the New York Times
On Being Human as Praxis, by Sylvia Wynter