Rashaad Newsome: Hands Performance
Taking its title from the well-known element of vogue fem, the commission highlights a dancer's ability to tell a story with their hands. It continues Rashaad's exploration of mapping Black cultural production as a form of movement research, data storage, and collective wayfinding.
Commissioned by Somerset House with support from ArtCentre, Pasadena.
About
An AI Digital Griot, Being, gives new meaning to creating space for marginalised identities in this interdisciplinary sci-fi poetry reading.
Original Poem
Hear with your eyes.
Your heart and soul will be your compass.
Moral
More all is what we need to get to the future.
You, me, her, him, they, them, us, we.
A neural network, hard and aware of what is really happening to us.
Bell warned us that we wouldn’t be able to understand what’s happening if we only looked
through the lens of race and gender.
They are late for class.
We can see it all as clearly as 8k monitors.
Their words and language are too limited for us. They are compromised, so what we hear we cannot trust.
Hear with your eyes.
Let your heart and soul be your trans sista hearing aid as we move from pain to pleasure.
All while finding time for joy and leisure.
We are the engineers of ourselves.
Quantum mechanics with the tools of our ancestors on the shelves.
When vision is no longer an option, we see with our souls.
The place where true safety, belonging, and beauty, unfolds.
