extramusical

— Édouard Glissant in One World In Relation (2010), Manthia Diawara. Film.

"I've been thinking about sculpture as a teaching tool. There's a saying I used to always hear: "sculpture is frozen music." I want something with some kind of movement to it. I'm adding elements that are not static, like transducers. I also use my years and years of experience in music and my training in martial arts to understand sculpture. There were movements I used to do that would be very quiet, maybe something from aikido or tai chi. Very slow, very slow... then all of a sudden you would burst out with this explosive, passive-aggressive energy. I wondered how I would put that into a piece of sculpture. I thought the explosion would be to put together some unorthodox elements and have contradictions set in. If a person were to look at it, it would provoke a kind of psychological motion inside of them."

Butch Morrise collaborating with Senga Nengudi

Walter Marchetti - Movements of a fly on a window from 8am to 7pm through some day in May, 1967 - 1967

– Beloved, Toni Morrison

https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the-black-catatonic-scream Excerpts: “We can trace how the unsayable, unspeakable, and unspoken align in Black music, and propel us into the confessional and verbose and pathological. But what are the effects of these sloping extremes on social, emotional, and spiritual life? Does the missing testimony terrorize the subconscious or find an alternative release, new dignity? I’m trying to locate, in Black silence, a balance between the forced and the deliberate, between I said what I said and never mind (redacted), between danger and comfort. Why do so many of us refuse language and linguistic articulation in our moments of shipwreck, and how do the ruins left by the unspoken legacy of soundless abandon become a surrogate language—one of threats, insinuations, eros, uprising, Blackness speaking while exceeding the verbal.” “Why are we obsessed with our music, speaking with our echo?” “Poetry and song are forms of that catatonic tendency to use words to declare forbidden narratives, to lead them down a lane that turns meaning into pure feeling and accesses the telepathic quality of that spinning inward. “ “Poems say no to becoming a pawn in the grammar. They defy the organization and hierarchies of meaning production that enforce the dominance of Western modes; they calmly abide nonsense knowing the wisdom and potential in the codes the West is too egomaniacal to be worthy of deciphering. Poems break the silence by giving it a rhythm to enter. They became my tongue in the place of an almost bribed quietness. Poems cured my catatonic tendency in many ways, broke a generational curse of ain’t nobody’s business, and restored our bloodline to its griot heyday where we were telling on everybody, crying on like newborns between hunger and divine laughter.” “The unsounded is the insistently unresolved, but how do we enter its unmentionable spaces and listen and find a way to respond when we haven’t even admitted to ourselves that there are whole events and sensations that we refuse to give to the kind of memory that words stitch to the heart and spirit?” “It is Black music’s task and calling to recover the unrecoverable vibration of truth locked in unspoken chaos and trauma. It is also the job of the body, or some hybrid poetics that uses music and gesture together, to move toward speech like a game of charades that no one really wants to win or escape. The Black and catatonic are my favorite singers of rigged redemption songs, and I’m urged to call our names.”