About the project:

film assignment ‘experimental film • UK • 3:21 • English

Practices in building black queer futurity is a transpilled experimental film that interrogates the future and survival of black queerness through personal reflection, automated editing features, generative AI and vision board making. It begins with a reading from Envisioning Utopia: The Aesthetics of Black Futurity (2019), a thesis by Sydney Haliburton that investigates how music and performance by black women artists contributes to black placemaking and future-building as the artists explore trauma, vulnerability, healing and black absurdism through the aesthetics of their work. This reading is layered on top of a poem I wrote in 2021 titled To Spaces That Contain Us Heart And Soul. This poem, written as a prayer, is shifted to a lower pitch so that the reader has a deeper more masculine voice. The volume of the poem is also decreased to a mumble to resemble the intention of the poem as prayer.