‘(…)
I am your fear
death and destruction
yes, I am your future
after you
I am the evolution of the species,
the tomorrow
the transcendental matter,
the perfect machine
the divine creation
here we are now
and we are here to stay
here and there
and everywhere
we will be resistance
the voice that can’t be silenced
the face of tomorrow
(…)’
Rampa is honored to premier in Portugal the
latest essay-performance by Melissa Rodrigues. Completed during the residency program at ZK/U*, split between Berlin and
Porto due to the recent Covid-19 pandemic, “CORONAS IN THE SKY, Not a
Manifesto! an essay on Afrofuturism and Liberation” is simultaneously an
activist poem and a reflection upon the effects of the speeding cycle of
natural disasters brought about by global warming and late capitalism, and how
they disproportionally impact racialized
subjects, mirroring a long
and fraught history of violence and
dispossess.
In this powerful essay, repetition and trauma are evoked in the cyclic return
of the tragic, yet iconic last words of Eric Garner.
I can’t breathe.
The sentence is introduced upon the recall of a
dream about drowning through which Rodrigues links Garner’s death to the
thousands of lives lost during transatlantic voyages, inflicted by the slave
trade. “Drowning in a sea of fire” is the next bend on the painful
free-associative path, and here the spoken word brings us to images of lynching
in the “gallant south”, in which fire and smoke fill the lungs of a hanging
victim.
As the video-poem unfolds, Rodrigues forces the
return of a legacy of condensed mental images, connecting them inexorably to
the present, our present. The noose is
now viral, and survival is once again edging on skin-color. No violence – not even “natural” violence –
falls upon its victims in a random, even, or just split. Just like Floyd repeated Garner’s words, and Covid
kills like a rope, violence returns, hurting and killing the same people in a
ritualized and nameless form. It happens
by design, not by chance, and so there is not only room, but also urgency for resistance
and change.
They agreed to killing us, we agreed on not
dying.
* ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics in
Berlin hosts this residency program under the umbrella of Magic Carpets
Platform co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.