A handful of earth, a seed attempts to penetrate the geography of violence that characterises America’s relationship to blackness. Weaving together a thickness out of video, poetry and the voices of Malcom X, Assata Shakur and Nina Simone it is a meditation on the ways that meaning is made out of the overlapping and contested spaces we inhabit. In a response to the soil it thinks about the productive forces of death, the possibility found at its horizons and the refusal embedded in the act of black life. Rather than reasoning with the logics of extraction and domination that shape an imperial/colonial relationship to the land, the poetry pushes itself into the gestural spaces created by black movement and expression. In contrast the videos map a visual language through the text, often departing from it and offering up ways of thinking about extraction and the way that a racist, colonial, capitalistic worldview produces similar relationships to black and brown people  as it does to indigenous geographies.

ABOUT OUR WRITER

Rohan Ayinde is a Chicago and London based artist, writer and curator. His interdisciplinary work is centred around creating "otherwise" potentials (Ashon Crawley), and in so doing breaking down and simultaneously reconfiguring the ideological architectures that shape our daily and generational lives. The landscapes his work explores are formed through the lens of a black radical tradition committed to imagining freedom as a horizon of possibility. They are an archive of the journey there; maps under continuous construction; refusals to acquiesce to the dominant structures of thought that frame the world we live in. Oscillating between text, video, drawings, photography and collage, Ayinde’s work is in a constant negotiation with itself, trying to understand the role it plays in building the worlds it is invested in imagining.