Statement
I make videos, photographs, performances, albums, and books. In my art I research relationships between stuttering, disabled speech, blackness, nature, divinity, sound, and time.
I’m a stutterer. Like many disabilities, stuttering can be understood as a form of embodiment that involves a specific relationship to time. I often require more time to speak than fluent people need, and this has led to painful, disabling experiences throughout my life. These experiences are a form of temporal trauma. In my work I try to heal from my own temporal traumas. And I try to offer healing possibilities to others, since many people have their own temporal wounds.
For me stuttering can slow, suspend, loop, chop, screw, and scramble time. My videos and music often “stutter.” Musically, I use techniques like drone, looping, polymeter, granular synthesis, digital time stretching, and rubato to create music that changes time in ways that are akin to the way stuttering changes time. Further, some of my music uses my literal stutter as an instrument. Through the stutter, I create “crip time” in music.
My work researches blackness. I study the ways black people have always used time-based art to resist our temporal subjection—i.e. the repercussions of the fact that, as Dr. Britney Cooper says, “white people own time.” Examples of black temporal subjection abound: mass incarceration, reproductive injustice for black women, slaveholders’ manipulation of clocks and watches on plantations. My ongoing research into black temporal subjection and resistance feeds directly into my work.
I’m deeply concerned with divinity and spirituality in my work. My grandfather was a Black Pentecostal minister. His preaching blurred the borders between speech and music. I follow in his footsteps through my use of music and text to approach the divine.
Work Sample Information
My work sample is an excerpt from Impediment is Information, a single-channel video I created while in residence at ISSUE Project Room in 2021. The full video is fourteen minutes long, and this clip occurs six minutes into the video. Impediment is Information is part of Benediction, a multimedia project I’ve been working on since 2020. The project centers on archives of so-called “runaway slave advertisements”—newspaper notices that enslavers placed in order to retrieve enslaved people who had escaped. In the project I focus on advertisements that concern enslaved people who stuttered or had speech impediments. Benediction includes performances, a forthcoming book (Aster of Ceremonies), musical compositions, and videos like Impediment is Information. I composed the text in the video by following poet m. nourbeSe philip’s method in her book Zong!. In Zong! she invites the reader into a ceremony. She creates poetry by rearranging the words in an 18th century legal case concerning a massacre of Africans aboard a slave ship. Likewise, in this video I rearrange the words of the newspaper advertisement to create fragments of poetry. Through this method, I seek other stories and ideas that the archive contains. I’m trying to “brush history against the grain,” to quote historian Saidiya Hartman. In her seminal text Scenes of Subjection she attends to the “cultivated silence, exclusions, relations of violence and domination that engender the official accounts” of slavery. In the same vein, through this project I want to attend to the cultivated silences (and cultivated stutters?) of these archives, to try to listen to the enslaved ancestors who are described in these documents.
"Impediment is Information" (excerpt)
4 min 57 sec
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