Abstract:

Amidst an already troubling social, political and ecological landscape, 2020 has brought into sharper focus the emergencies of contagion and carceral technologies. In the continuing global struggles against anti-Black violence, queer, transphobic, ableist Conservative governance and pandemic ‘new normal’ living; the nurturing of ancestral connection and collective intimacy has never felt more pressing. Thinking with the work of Sondra Perry ‘Typhoon Coming On’ and recent feminist and critical race interventions I seek to show how Perry curates a different past for us to choose through digital manipulation using Blender, an open-source 3D graphics program. I argue that this employment of a narrative, visual, performative ‘glitch’ (Russell, 2020) follows a history of Black, queer/trans* and disabled activist interventions of how to present and perform narratives that reframe institutional limits. Whereby imagining radical otherwise(s) where we gift our labour to each other as opposed to institutions, co-create the spaces to weather the ongoing disasters and mobilise a resistance that centres pleasure and joy.

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The Frames/Windows/Mirrors conference was held as part of the NYU Cinema Studies program at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Full program details can be found here