for the record (2021)

For us who live the frequencies and fiction of empires and self-creation, the archive requires poesis and abstraction; for us archival refusal is an act of pressing our ears to the image peephole through to the somewhere score of the said and unsaid things of our everyday lives. Neighbouring London and Vancouver, we reinterpret each other’s practice and sense of place. 'For the Record' is a diasporic archive which embraces this rich tone and texture of diasporic romance. The romance, for the record, is not a move away from the difficult complexity of living in diaspora; the diasporic romance that 'For the Record' captures is the unseen, unvoiced, undoing tenderness of Black kinship.

By Phanuel Antwi and Rhea Storr, commissioned for Transmediale 2021

Noted Voices: Phanuel Antwi and Rhea Storr

Noted Places: London; Black Cultural Archives, Brixton Market, Former site of Olive Morris House, Railton Road, Windrush Square. Vancouver; Benny's Market, English Bay, The Fourteen Chapel, The Georgia Viaduct, Hogan Alley's alleyways, Joe Forte restaurant.

Notes Sources: A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Dionne Brand), Listening to Images (Tina M. Campt), Untitled and Outdoors: Thinking with Saidiya Hartman (Sarah Jane Cervenak & J. Kameron Carter), Worry the Image (Aria Dean), Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World (Denise Ferreira Da Silva), Negotiating Caribbean Identities (Stuart Hall), Tradition the Writer and Society (Wilson Harris), The Undercommons: Fugutive Planning and Black Study (Stefano Harney & Fred Moten), Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Robin D.G. Kelley), The Site of Memory (Toni Morrison), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Christina Sharpe), Beyond Aesthetics: Use Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions (Wole Soyinka), The Black Outdoors: Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten at Duke University, The Wedge (William Carlos Williams), Novel and History, Plot and Plantation (Sylvia Wynter).