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48h woman silver salber williams

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Sat, 15 Jun 2019 13:00

Location WerkStadt, Emser Straße 124, 12051 Berlin

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Salber Williams

A Woman in Silver

Audio Visual Performance by Salber Williams // 48 h Neukölln

An Afro futuristic audio visual performance in which the female body explores Frantz Fanon's depiction of black consciousness in the past, in today, and in the future.

A woman sits on a chair. As time passes, she cycles through poses demanding a great deal of physical strength. She wears a tin-foil headdress, a futuristic garment drawing on the icon of those worn during ceremonial occasions, specifically in Zimbabwe—a post colonial state still dealing with the social repercussions of institutionalized racism; the country from where the artist comes. Beside her, rests a speaker. It emits a manipulated voice sharing excerpts from the revolutionary Frantz Fanon, in his seminal essay, "The Fact of Blackness". In this piece of writing he “re-remembers and puts together a dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present”. The voice belongs to both history and to the future; locating its exact position in time is an impossibility. It is coupled with percussive rhythms to create a larger soundscape of an imagined fantasy futuristic world.

The piece juxtaposes the icon of an unbreakable woman of color and the overwhelming reminder of the psychological mechanism through which she has been conditioned to see and understand herself. With the added impossibility of being unable to locate time, but yet with a clear futuristic aesthetic, "A woman in Silver" digs deeper into black consciousness in the past and in today. It is the "Future Perfect Continuous Passive"; a loop back between progress, regression, protest and passivity. How far have we actually moved? How much further can we move? Using Afrofuturism as a model for understanding the need to represent African bodies in imaginings of the future, the piece shouts out, “I am here, I have been here, and I will be here tomorrow! Now notice me, and listen to me.”

 

June 15, 2019:

* 3 pm * 4 pm * 5 pm

 

June 16, 2019:

* 02:30 pm * 03:30 pm