Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
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Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
A programme looking at landscape, filmic or architectural spaces and at how the fixed stare of a camera frame only captures so much reality; here we focus on how filmmakers structure our relationship with that reality and at how they relate it to or interpret it through sound.
Ellis’s processional, precessional cessation and continuation of movement and music comes to us via his forthcoming release Aster of Ceremonies (Milkweed Editions, 2023)
Miniscule free-noise hissy-fits and broken instrument scrape/ squeal jams from the fools what brought you Giant Tank.
A silent collage of found film footage partially layered with computer graphics to provide a framework in which live music can develop.
If life is assaulted by power, where do we find spaces for living? A conversation with Peter Pál Pelbart.
Sean and Taku share an interest in structure, space and time. A spartan, abstract, considered and surprisingly musical set.
Vanessa Place talks at The Friday Event series at the Glasgow School of Art about her practice as a writer.
An open-ended moment in an ongoing series of films, notes, performances, diagrams and drawings which trace the questions they share. A “porous space between cinema time-space and lived time-space.”
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.