liquid blackness and AMPLIFY present

FACING THE BAND: ELISSA BLOUNT MOORHEAD AND THE (ANA)ARCHITECTURES OF COMMUNITY TIES (2019-20) 

Introduction | Event Schedule | liquid blackness in Conversation with EBM | Facing the Band Research Project  | About the Artist | Support 

Introduction
Elissa Blount Moorhead is an award-winning artist, curator, writer, and producer, who explores “the poetics of quotidian Black life” by looking at the vestiges of private lived experiences. She creates artifacts that counter cultural erasure and “emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community building.”

Blount Moorhead is committed to collaborative creative processes that implement an anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist view of filmmaking, and are instead propelled by what she describes as a “feminine energy.” As partner in the production company, TNEG, alongside Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed, her goal has been to capture the intensities of black lives, the rhythms of lineages of knowledge and self-determination, as they are passed on and passed through, and in this way, effect the very evolution of cinema.

Honoring her desire to model her stance after Miles Davis’s decision to play “facing his band,” as a way of expressing her centeredness in modes of black care, liquid blackness and AMPLIFY present Facing the Band: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the (Ana)architectures of Community Ties. This event is a conversation with the artist that will explore her anarchitectural interventions against the patriarchal logics of film production, and movement toward modes of collaborative and improvisational co-creation, and community building.

liquid blackness has lifted the term “anarchitecture” from the artist’s description of a recent project, As of A Now, an x-ray film projection showing now vacant row houses in Baltimore full of the audiovisual stories of their former Black denizens, using oral histories and augmented reality (“As of a Now,” Creative Capital). Derived from Gordon Matta-Clark’s radical practice, Blount Moorhead deploys the idea of anarchitecture both as a way of upending the prescribed functionality of architectural structures and to think of buildings as connective tissues, capable of acting as repositories of lived histories that urban renewal makes otherwise disappear.

By elevating the mundane, archiving the gestural, and channeling the creative energies of both her ancestors and her milieu, Blount Moorhead’s work challenges understandings of what constitutes public history, where it is found, and how it might take shape.

liquid blackness in Conversation with Elissa Blount Moorhead

October 23 Teach-In

November 19 Keynote

Events Schedule
Teach-in on Friday, October 23 at noon on Zoom
To engage with the writings and visual art works of Elissa Blount Moorhead in preparation for a November 19 keynote with the artist

Keynote on Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 7pm streaming on liquid blackness FaceBook live
Facing the Band: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the (Ana)architectures of Community Ties
A Conversation on Co-creation and Community Building
with Elissa Blount Moorhead and members of the liquid blackness research group

Presented by liquid blackness and AMPLIFY 
AMPLIFY: media arts for collective strength, is an expression of the collective work of Prof. Susan-Sojourna Collier, Prof. Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Dr. Jade Petermon, Dr. Alessandra Raengo, Karin Smoot, and Matt Rowles (COTA Tech)

Support

The event is supported by: National Council on Public History and the Department of Film and Media, Emory University