BLACK BODY AMNESIA

Black Body Amnesia: Live at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, 2022.

Premiering in 2022, Black Body Amnesia (the performance reading) examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people that negotiate psychic and spiritual lifeworlds that exist beyond the captive conditions induced by racially reductive renderings of the African American body. It is performed with an alternating ensemble of virtual doulas including jaamil olawale kosoko, Raymond Pinto, mayfield brooks, DJ Maij, Nile Harris, and KJ Wade, with sound composition by Everett Asis Saunders.

In this new work, kosoko uses complexity theory—which they define as the study of adaptive survivalist strategies inside complex networks or environments—as a theatrical device manifesting within the construction of the alternate ego J-Lov. From this artistic vantage point, the artist explores how minoritarianized communities record and affirm their existence through collaborative actions and protests. Black Body Amnesia attempts to archive ongoing acts and while re-activating histories of black collaborative action, we find personal narratives of freedom that subvert culturally-charged fields of systemic oppression, loss, and erasure.

Rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care, Black Body Amnesia continues kosoko’s engagement in public and performative scholarship. It is a communal act of public study in which the whole process is made visible.

The performance of Black Body Amnesia follows 2020’s Chameleon (The Living Installments), which repurposed the online social platform Discord as an interactive venue where the artist hosted audio transmissions of original sound footage from a new moving-image work, a multi-media zine, remote conversations, a somatic workshop, and an archive of images, videos, and links. Many of the theories and documents from this event find themselves in Black Body Amnesia, now staged (as an in person or virtual transmission art work offering a deeper embodied experience for both the spectator and performers.  

In addition to the performance work, Black Body Amnesia is also being shared as a book (available now) and as a living web-based archive which host documentation of the multiple iterations of the work serving as a public research hub, and as a repository for definitions of Black love.

People

jaamil olawale kosoko (director/choreographer/performer)

Shana Crawford (production manager)
Michelle Daly (producing manager)
Dede (makeup)
LD DeArmon (lighting supervisor)
Queen Drea (performer)
Ebony Noelle Golden (performer)
Nile Harris (performer/doula)
Kara Jenelle (assistant director/virtual doula)
Dahlia Li (dramaturg)
George MacLeod (post-production/video editor)
Alexis McCrimmon (video editor)
Maij (cellist/tarot reader)
Jasmine Murrell (video)
Raymond Pinto (performer/dj)
Everett Saunders (sound artist)
Ima Iduozee (video)
Savonne Whitfield (costume stylis/fabricator)
Serena Wong (lighting designer)

Past Installments

October 26-27, 2022
Presented by Dampfzentrale, Bern, Switzerland
More details

September 29-October 2, 2022
Presented by Arsenic, Lausanne, Switzerland
More details

August 26, 2022
Presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
More details

July 7, 2022
Presented by the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY
More details

February 27, 2022
Presented by New York Live Arts, New York, NY
More details

February 2022
Presented by The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
More details

Funding

The creation of Black Body Amnesia: LIVE was supported by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY; the Wexner Center for the Arts; Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program; Dance/NYC Advancement Fund; and Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF), a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; the Pew Fellowship in the Arts; and The Hinterlands Residency, Detroit.

Book

Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts enlivens a personal archive of visual and verbal offerings written and organized by jaamil olawale kosoko. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, kosoko mixes personal history, biography, and mythology to tell a complex narrative rooted within a queer, Black, self-defined imagination.

This collection of intertextual performance acts captures the ephemeral data often lost or edited out of kosoko’s live performances. Developed alongside their ongoing, multi-media live art project, American Chameleon, and elaborating on the artist’s unique practice of Socio-Choreological Mapping as a means to explore queer theories of the body and its "hydraulics of grief," this book offers critical-creative frames to consider the fluid identities and lifeworlds embedded inside contemporary Black America.

With an introduction by editor Dahlia (Dixon) Li, and contributions by Sara Jane Bailes, mayfield brooks, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Nadine George-Graves, Nile Harris, Ima Iduozee, Lisa Jarrett, Bill T. Jones, Jennifer Kidwell, Malkia Okech, Ada M. Patterson, Tracy K. Smith, and Jillian Steinhauer.

Published February 2022 by Wendy’s Subway, NYC
Document Series #9
Softcover, 236 pages, 9.2 x 6.6 inches
ISBN: 978-1-7359242-6-7
Designed by Omnivore
Edition of 500
Printed in Italy

Audiobook

Black Body Amnesia (Poems) asks its readers to for(e)get as a means of reimagining the future and the ways in which we vision and move towards it. Dominant culture emphasis forgetting as something lost to the past, whereas for(e)getting seeks to focus our attention on what is to come.

Read by jaamil olawale kosoko
Also available in French