khadij​at.

BLACK LIVES STILL MATTER.
This was created both in remembrance of the women and children killed by rampant white supremacy, be it by police or fellow civilians, and as pushback to the way cishet Black men are prioritized in thought and action when there are more marginalized and vulnerable members of the community also dying – without headlining the news or spurring any kind of public demonstration (Black men are still included in this work though – they’re just not *centered* in it). This is for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor. It is also for Kier Solomon, Dymond Sanders, and Jaida Peterson.
About a month ago, I told a coworker that the racial dissonance in our society reads like a bad TV signal, where the voices of Black folk are always barely heard, barely understood by everyone else and images of us are grossly distorted. The idea for this #multimedia piece was born a few hours later, and the name from finishing it on Black Friday.
I created the #glass board in a charcuterie workshop @pghglasscenter and made the video using an overlay of the board and its sections in a small scale attempt at #projectionmapping – rear projection film was added to the board to get as crisp an image as possible, since the glass slices vary in color and opacity. I also sifted through a few hours of various civil rights speeches (it is very interesting and intimate to hear what some of our forbears actually sounded like) to find bits that resonated with the imagery. Speech excerpts are by Fannie Lou Hamer, Marcus Garvey, and Mary McLeod Bethune.