Obsidian Dream Love Letters (2023)
A blackening with no well,
no ending
A blackening so dark,
an eternal dance through a void passage
A blackening of millions of souls claiming me in the bluestest moon
Dressed in white, their smiles so gentle
The land howling my name,
rivers cleansing the lies of my memory
The night gravel’s echo of burning before
fuller with the steps I took back,
forward,
A blackening so black I lose myself
And yet, i see my reflection in its gloss
Ô volcanic black smoke mirror
Oracular technology of the landscapes of the dead
Kaleidoscopic fractured glass
Invincible, yet vulnerable at once
it depends how you touch it
And how it touches you
Once a healer of cataracts combined with (rose) quartz
Obsidian,
erupted
Carried in sacrificial blades of Tezcatlipoca
And yet, it is its pure manifestation
Divinity of crossroads,
Subterranean fires,
Such as the orisha Aggayu
Its keeper
Birthed from the lodges of the ancestral,
Mountains of old lava cooling in the sea
Obsidian, erupted
Obsidian
a collaborative multimedia installation with video, sculpture, mapped visuals and performance evoking inter dimensional cosmologies and practices of an ecoerotic blackening consciousness.
Obsidian and quartz stone have been long time erotic companions of healing and care in the form of yoni eggs in my own body, crystals I carried in purses, or offered to beloved ones, and contained in several altars from home to home. Their affect in our performer (and living) bodies altered our ways of moving in the world and within performance, inducing the body into what I call - glitched possession. Such states, or, performativities, asks us to move backwards in loops, to retrace memory, failure, and map sensation zones, desire, and the erotic in support of, and against the hijacked bodies we carry. Hijacked bodies are born out of structural persistent colonial and patriarchal violence we endure through different forms of marginality we navigate in this world.
The stone material works as an energetic supporter, enhancing the exchange between a medium or channel-like type of body, within an expansion between the tensions of materiality (and its economies on earth) and embodiment (of our multiple bodies).
Dream
This is an invitation
To sing in another time
To become a storm
that rains louder than it cries
To become the water we return to
And the earth we shall remember
— Sall Lam Toro and Suziethecockroach (video voice-over)
The video evokes a 2 and 3D inter dimensional fever dream with subliminal messaging starring a black queer killjoy cohort called Ambers as both narrator and main character, inhabiting different realms; from an subterranean obsidian sea, to dry forest wild fires, a wide ocean, a waterfall, and a home apartment in Dakar, Senegal.
The Ambers, together with the ghost(s) arises in the in-between-ness of space, ether, its transitions, and embodies the erratic, the inexpressible, the margins, the black-out and the after life. They transition amongst themselves, half-bodiless, fem, as fast or slow like a virus, between different astral locations, and, transmorph with a ghost both split, yet also merged as one at the same time.
Their function in the video is a proposal of an unwriting of the self, as fugitive of such systemic structures that keep us disembodied, displaced from land, unattuned to spirit and ebb and flow, and even, unconscious to our own lives. This unwriting of the self is not an individualistic proposition, but rather, communal.
The Ambers-ghost cohort perform a questioning of their own self-determination and authorship within a time concept restructuring based on failure and glitch as a modus.
Love
“we turn to skin, resonance, and tenderness as the raw material of our reimagined earthy sensibility. Remembering that to be tender is to soften like supple grass, and to attend to is to care for, to serve. Serving, we know, is the opposite of slavery just as violence dissolves with care”.
— Denise Ferreira da Silva in “Fractal Thinking”
The installation multi-piece invites you into spiral manifestos of atemporal and multidimensional colonial fugitivity with the support of enacted sensuous rituals between the performers imbued by the presence of obsidian and rose quartz raw living bodies.
Imagination is called upon as a love gesture guiding us into remembrance of, and, within ancestral land.
The erotic and acts of care persist in the offers we give to one another, in gestures of attention, affection and sensuality, collapse, recognition, support, mirroring, and eloping into collective transformation.
Fugitivity is only possible because we love, and so the desire to die differently, better, in communion with an aliveness of hope and liberation becomes essential.
Letters
Visual elements of water with the contrasting spoken noise-industrial hip hop soundscape, and our cohort heroine narrator’s dark comedic reflections and observations carries the viewer through sequences of recorded footage of somatically conducted interviews as a way to approach archival knowledge through interwoven acts of caretaking and caregiving between bodies.
These somatically induced and meditative interviews in the video arose from a curiosity into asking what if the body can be an archive and how to make it speak authentically by inviting silences, whispers, breath, disjointed words, tension, and memories ignited by the touch of another. This performativity matched the performers live as they moved also in glitches, disjointed, possessed and altered by the rituals they performed, the frequencies of the obsidian, rose quartz, water, and plant cosmologies.
Installation exhibition period from 31.05.2023 to 18.06.2023 At Dag Hammarskjölds Allé 42D, 4th floor.
Performance on the 14.06.2023 (19:00 and 20:00) At Dag Hammarskjölds Allé 42D, 4th floor, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Curated by Ariel Feminisms as part of Fear and Fauna group exhibition
Photo and video documentation courtesy of Ariel Feminisms and Dag Hammarskjölds Allé 42D, 4th floor credited to Malle Madsen
Installation exhibition period from 16.06.23 to 16.07.23 at Sharp Projects curated by Ilethia Sharp
Supported by Nørrebro Kommune Pulje and Statens Kunstfond
Performance premiere on the 06.06-10.06 at Den Frie Udstillingsted Bygning as part of Close Encounters Embodied Journeys produced by Danshallerne and curated by Julienne Doko, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Photo and video documentation by Christian Brems at the courtesy of Danshallerne and Connexions
Credits:
creation, co-choreography, artistic direction, sculpture work and performance: Sall Lam Toro
script writing, performance, co-choreography, assistance: Suziethecockroach
original soundtrack composition and production: Warren Jones
videography, pov, narrative: Keiria Hissabu
light and visuals design: Will Zawistowski
costume design: Serena Coelho
3D animation and promotion visuals: Janice Prempeh
interview with Ndey Tabara Korka
Extended performance version premiere at at New Sh*t at Edison Theatre produced by Danshallerne x Betty Nansen and curated by Escarleth Pozo 29.08.23