2023 Black Spatial Relics Artists-in-Residency and Micrograntees Announced

Black Spatial Relics is a convener, presenter and supporter of Black radical performance, community care, collective research and transformative gathering. Since 2016, Black Spatial Relics has operated the Black Spatial Relics Residency program which supports the development of new works about slavery, justice and freedom in the U.S and the Caribbean.

In 2020, Black Spatial Relics launched the Micro Grant Program for Community Care and Collective Research. The Black Spatial Relics Residency is made possible with support from The Black Seed, a regranting program of the Mellon Foundation, the JKW Foundation, W Trust, The Leeway Foundation and independent donors. Black Spatial Relics is a fiscally sponsored project at Slought Foundation. 2022-23 Black Spatial Relics artists in residence are Ayana Omilade Flewellen, Angel Shanel Edwards, Frewuhn, Marguerite Hemmings, kara lynch and Ron Ragin, Karma Mayet Johnson, Charlyn Griffith-Oro and Tamara Williams.

This cohort of remarkable artists was selected by a panel of Black arts makers and leaders including Abdul Aliy Muhammad (Philadelphia, PA), Crystal Z Campbell (Tulsa, OK) and Sonja Dumas (Port of Spain, Trinidad).

Artists-in-Residence receive 2,500.00 in project support, dramaturgical support, in-person residency and presenting opportunities at the 2023 Black Spatial Relics Convening and other programmatic amplification.

About The Artists In Residence

Ayana Omilade Flewellen (Oakland, CA) is the creator of Black Oceanic Breath. Black Oceanic Breath is a performance art project that takes shape within the liquidity of the Atlantic Ocean at known sites of shipwrecks from vessels that carried enslaved Africans through the Middle Passage. Centered on the Black body as the site for physiological registers of transgenerational trauma and healing, this project explores the potentiality of submerged breath as ecological communion with the ocean (experienced here as kin, ancestor and guide) that reckons with the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives.

angel shanel edwards (Philadelphia, PA) is the creator of BOUND is another word for self-determination in another world. 'BOUND is another word for self-determination in another world' is a performance-based exploration of transtiddies, their terrains, and the maps they make. This work will come to life through monologue, movement, sonic scores, projection, and living sculpture.

Frewuhn (Houston, TX) is the creator of Sensorium. Frewuhn presents a series of sonics, poetics, field recordings and eulogies titled Sensorium, an exploration of spatial identity and the cumulative disorders that have mutated through generations, Dr. Joy DeGruy refers to this as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome....

This Soundlab is designed to frame sacred and mundane "routes" toward the self and environment as sites of neurological emancipation, offering interventions that will potentially accompany clinical healing modalities. Sensorium is composed of multimedia scores that disrupt material, space, time, and duration in continuous waves of frequency, creating a disruption of patriarchal survival- mode patterning.

kara lynch + Ron Ragin are creating BlackFlight Experiments.

Experiment1_your body is water/

Experiment2_yield to the earth/

Experiment3_yield to the air//

Inspired by and in conversation with the ongoing legacies of Black struggles for liberation, BlackFlight is a collaborative project that explores the embodiment of freedom in everyday practice and in performance. Born from Black August in Motion, which Ron Ragin initiated as an online exchange among 22 Black artists in summer 2020, BlackFlight weaves multi-modal research into a series of participatory events that collectively explore Black interiority, heal our relationship to land, water, air and all our relations in the shadow of settler colonialism, and practice our freedom dreams. For the BSR residency, they will explore Experiment2_yield to the earth: On a sunwarm day at Algiers Point, 15 Black performers who are lying on quilts slowly rise and fall, as musicians play and community gathers and begins to explore their own bodies' potential for flight.

*Gratitude to SpiritHouse of Durham, NC for the Black August 575 tradition that inspired Black August in Motion.

Marguerite Hemmings (Philadelphia, PA) is the creator of Cypher Practices//Free Codes. Cypher Practices//Free Codes is an activation of dance cyphers outside with Black people, where we live and love. Connecting these cyphers to the histories and residues of any and all 'Black Codes' and laws that have limited Black movement/existence/ritual, we de-cypher our own codes, embody our own bodies, and free our public expressions and relations to each other, the sky, and the land.

Karma Mayet Johnson (New York, NY) is the creator of Indigo, a Blues opera. Of this work, Karma lifts the following quotation: "We have a historical record of many of the traditional hymns, field hollers, spirituals, and blues that our ancestors carried out of slavery and into the 20th century. However, we have very few aural recordings of the hidden histories of physical resistance, of collaboration with Native American communities, of queer love, of successful self defense and escape that must have existed during that time. Channeling spirits across time, ethnicity and generations, Karma queers the slave narrative to find two enslaved African women deeply in love and daring enough to overcome fear". Tyehimba Jess

charlyn/magdaline griffith/ oro (Philadelphia, PA/ Joshua Tree, CA/ Trinidad & Tobago) is the creator of WHINEUP. GODOWN. MOAN. WHINEUP. GODOWN. MOAN is a massage of the connective tissues between the Caribbean movement of whining one's waist and the Trinbagonian Spiritual Baptist tradition of mourning. Is the ecstasy of public celebrations different from the catharsis of insular, expressive grief? Like birth and org*sm, do they share a neurochemical facilitating both? Is there a hormone facilitating both phenomena? Is it named Jumbie? This piece is one act from Griffith-Oro's larger work A Provenance.

Tamara Williams (Charlotte, NC) is the creator of Long MEmories. This project entitled, Long MEmories, is an evening-length performance including dance, music and digital installation honoring African American Ring Shout traditions and ancestry. The mission is to continue to share, preserve and celebrate African American history, culture and heritage, while telling narratives of African American through Ring Shout dancing, gospel hymns, and oral traditions.

About The Micrograntees

In 2020, Black Spatial Relics launched the Black Spatial Relics Micro Grants for Community Care and Collective Research. These microgrants offer 500.00 awards to artists. This year through that program, we funded 10 projects around the country that centered research on Black liberatory practices and spaces for community care, and we are entering our fourth year of offering these awards. In 2023 the ten artists receiving micro grants include: They include: Severin Blake, V (Philadelphia, PA), Nikki Brake-Sillá, Say It Ain't So (Philadelphia, PA), Akima Brackeen, Alexis Casson, Siaira Shawn Harris, Black Aquatic Milieu (Chicago, IL), Chibueze Crouch, WHY CHASE DEATH? (Oakland, CA), Doriana Diaz Collage Workshops (Philadelphia, Pa), Ayan Felix, nascent (Durham, NC), Sherese Francis, KwaNTum: ReVer(b)sions Lab (New York, NY), Philly Jawns / For Women Collective, My Skin is Black (Aldan, PA), g'beda t. Lyles, Blues & Bolero (El Paso, TX), and Sisi Reid/ Soul Shine Theater Garden, Rock Paper Scissors (Washington, DC), .

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