Project overview
“In Loving Memory of…”: A Symphonic Celebration of Black Lives is a collaborative, performative celebration of life that contrasts the history of Black bodies subject to biopolitical power with a life-affirming multimodal performance. It is conceived in response to a New York Times interactive article entitled “Black Lives Upended by Policing: The Raw Videos Sparking Outrage,” in which they compiled 32 videos containing “disturbing and graphic scenes of violence... to provide a record of the raw footage that has sparked a national conversation about race and policing.” The project functions both as art in public and art in the public interest, forging a direct intersection with the social issues of state violence, corporeal justice and collective grieving.
The project responds to the concern that consumption of trauma on social media has resulted in desensitization, “turning trauma into white noise” (Chappet, 2022). It raises the questions: Can the numbing impact of curated suffering be reversed to reclaim empathetic intent and social justice? How do we turn reactions to online trauma into reparative possibilities?
Structured as a symphonic performative eulogy, the project engages meaningfully in grief work and is structured specifically to be a transformative communal process and invites the public to move through the acknowledgement of racialised state violence, and its accompanying pain and trauma as an extant reality, and to embrace communal mourning, commemoration, meaning making and support. Thematically, the goal is to redefine and resurrect through artistic practice, reinvigorating and reviving the memories of Black lives lost to state violence. As such, the intended impact is a social impact (with an immediate impact on the participating communities), a cultural impact (with the intent to speak to issues of power, violence, and the role of technoculture), and an impact on health and wellbeing (the hope is that the work has cathartic power that transforms grief and anger into purpose).
The project responds to the concern that consumption of trauma on social media has resulted in desensitization, “turning trauma into white noise” (Chappet, 2022). It raises the questions: Can the numbing impact of curated suffering be reversed to reclaim empathetic intent and social justice? How do we turn reactions to online trauma into reparative possibilities?
Structured as a symphonic performative eulogy, the project engages meaningfully in grief work and is structured specifically to be a transformative communal process and invites the public to move through the acknowledgement of racialised state violence, and its accompanying pain and trauma as an extant reality, and to embrace communal mourning, commemoration, meaning making and support. Thematically, the goal is to redefine and resurrect through artistic practice, reinvigorating and reviving the memories of Black lives lost to state violence. As such, the intended impact is a social impact (with an immediate impact on the participating communities), a cultural impact (with the intent to speak to issues of power, violence, and the role of technoculture), and an impact on health and wellbeing (the hope is that the work has cathartic power that transforms grief and anger into purpose).
