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Bird and Lava

Bird and Lava

A project by Torkwase Dyson

Wexner Center for the Arts Visual Artist Residency Award 2020

The Wexner Center for the Arts Visual Artist Residency Award 2020 has been granted to me during a moment of

isolation and the ongoing state violence.  I'm using this

digital platform as a method of communication during this 

trying time.   The first part of this residency will live here and

contain notes and research ideas that otherwise would be shared

in person.  It is a living document.  

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architecture

surfaces

infrastructure

magnitude

distance

proximity

movement

black hauntology 

modulation

ocean

ontology 

here

Space is a relative material 

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Dedicated to Paul R. Williams 

 

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to be of space

to be of scale

to be of blue

to be of black

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The Tower
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state change,
always state change
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There is no universal now, there is a subjective here.
 
Expanded
Concrete  Abstract 
Expanded perception 
Expanded Awareness
Expanded
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Dark Black

the installation (WEX) 

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Construction as a way of knowing who she is.  Pilot and her box.

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here i am way over there inside me 
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If systemic oppression is a form,  systemic liberation is as well. I look into histories where methods of liberation live. And what I see my ancestors want me to know. 
 
 
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In this moment my questions are of scale, movement, perception, distance and state change.  More concretely my questions focus on built environments of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and modernism's participation in the horrors of climate change and dispossession. It is a very simple ambition, and that is to consider spatial strategies of black and indigenous people across the world as foundations of invention as we make livable worlds.

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This drawing has become and object in the round. 

 

-Glissant's questions of opacity and transparency 

has become a mediation in architecture.   

This drawing/architecture is based on the understanding that there are multiple liberation strategies in the age of the Plantationocene.

Some quotidian and some phenomenological .

Note:

Scale-modularity

 

Has scale been a  friend of freedom? Robin D. G. Kelly evoked this question.