BLACK LIVES MATTER
SITES OF POWER is the latest Black Imagination exhibition-slash-experience co-created in community to center and amplify the resonance of our intersectional Black voices. Viral conceptual artist, Natasha Marin, led this evocative iteration of this on-going project with award-winning director, Jay O'Leary Woods.
Over 20 organizations have supported this on-going project, including 4Culture with a generous grant of $8,500. Curator, Natasha Marin, joined forces with Jay O'Leary Woods, who worked remotely from Scotland and Seattle to direct 8 performers, 1 composer, and a video editor (all in different locations) to create a series of short video adaptations based on the book Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures (McSweeney's, 2020) amidst a global pandemic. With support from Jack Straw Cultural Center, Marin interviewed local Seattleites for Sites of Power and collaborated with creatives like Dante Barger, Chris Ivey, Sydney Foster and others across disciplines to create this interactive online experience featuring experiments with sound, video, and visual art. +Statement
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SITES OF POWER: Statement*
We feel powerful when we make decisions that benefit us directly--making space for self-love, self care, and owning our desires is like drinking miracle water. We feel most powerful when we are aligned with rhythm-- the rhythm of our internal desire, the rhythm of our heartbeat and breath, the rhythm of our community, the rhythm of rest, the rhythm of how we create, the rhythm of belly laughter, the rhythm of connection and cuddles, the rhythm of consistent hydration, and the rhythm of the dance that never leaves us.
We feel powerful when the Black femmes in our network are acknowledged, paid, loved, protected, and seen because that means that we will be too. We feel powerful when we are held and uplifted by our community. Because of each other, we feel powerful enough to be our truest selves and demand the respect that we are too often denied by a white supremacist, cis-heteronormative patriarchal society. When we feel safe, we feel powerful.
We feel powerful when we are actively choosing to be vulnerable. We feel powerful when we remind ourselves that we deserve love. We feel powerful when we are at peace with chaos--when all that we love is moving forward. When we are standing, living, breathing, exuding the full glory that is our ancestors, we feel our power. When we use every experience we have had to prepare us for what's to come, we feel powerful. When we are wholly ourselves without judgement or doubt, whether external or internal, we are and always will be at our most powerful. We feel powerful when Black folks do powerful things for and with each other. And we feel powerful when we remember who the fuck we are.
*This statement was created in community by the Sites of Power contributors.