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?
A conversation between Philip and Moten: how do we read NourbeSe’s anti-narrative poetic lament in Glasgow today, given the city’s role in the history of slavery?
Terry is one of the most entertaining and unpredictable musicians in the London free improvising music scene. Rhodri Davies extends his instrument under a battery of techniques creating sound colours and textures quite alien to the harp.
Sometimes delicate, sometimes harsh and jarring, Yagi’s koto solos are as much inspired by Nancarrow or Cage as they are traditional.
Edinburgh. Nigh-inaudible improv jams with disabled instruments from the makers of Giant Tank and Pizza Boy Delivery.
Black Boned Angel’s is a rock sound, stripped of all extraneous detail right down to its core, stretched out and nailed to the ceiling.
One of the great experimental films. A 60 minute, three part riddle that maybe approximates our intellectual development by moving from imageless words to the recognition of silent images and the learning of simple tasks and finally a serenity and acceptance of death.
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
Psychedelic and intense, and featuring some of the most visually stunning, mesmerizing and transcendent experiences you can imagine, batten down the hatches for some of the boldest, most immersive and abrasive works in experimental cinema.
Goofily deformed, deeply thought vocal jams: like the sound of your own breath rushing through your head.
5 days of film, music, discussion and study of our collective incompleteness—arrayed against the colonial ordering of how we come to know the world—practicing how we might exist otherwise, right here and now. Can we start to know and practice the world to come?
Killer of Sheep is an undisputed masterpiece of African-American filmmaking and one of the most poetic, perceptive dramas ever made about family and community.