The GUIDE arrives in time and space.

The GUIDE, an embodiment of non-Western critical theory, conjures “Transmission: A Survival Praxis Through Hood Feminism, Négritude, and Poetics” through a performance lecture collaborating with The BODY, a holder of the lived experience occupying the marginalized category of an Afro-Caribbean American Woman. What the witnesses experienced was a Transmission, a conjuring praxis that is an aspect of an artistic research project about the colonial project of making and sustaining “identity” in the Western social context and a speculative Post-Identity Dimension that acts in opposition to it.

Established by critical theory from Black, Indigenous, and Feminist canons, the Post-Identity Dimension is a space of rest for performance weary identities. This Transmission unpacks the historical precarity of Black female subjectivity in the durational performance of living in the Western landscape and the roles, spaces, and times she must occupy. The GUIDE makes this provocation by activating Hood Feminism as a practice that critiques the academic operations of traditional feminist theory by centering on concern for the everyday survival of the Black woman and the habitual subjugation tactics she endures. Négritude as a return to the cultural ideologies of Black cultural communities of the pre-colonial site before the establishment of the fictive notions of white superiority and the inferiority of who is considered “other” in the gaze of the Eurocentric lens. Poetics is a methodology of working through and creating relations between theories of Hood Feminism and Négritude by establishing respectful discourse around differences between human citizens to achieve togetherness for humanity to survive how we have arrived at the contemporary social condition.

The Performance utilized 360 degree video streaming to bring the virtual viewers and the viewers in physical space together to witness the performance in space. The GUIDE commanded the space using singing bowls, by reading text from Black female scholars, and playing records on a record player. The records contained meditations and thoughts of women from the African diaspora speaking to the condition of occupying their bodies in a Western landscape. The GUIDE uses the Singing bowls and records to activate 360 portals as a offering of rest, and as another moment for witnesses near and far to share the space (as the portals were only available through the stream and in order to enter them the witness had to use a smart device capable of streaming).

The GUIDE vanishes in still[ness].