Introduction 

Active in the UK between 1982 and 1999, The Black Audio Film Collective’s work employs avant-garde techniques to articulate black life that Britain’s official history, record, and public sphere was determined to ignore or suppress. Formed in response to the conservative politics and racial uprising of the Thatcher era, the seven member BAFC created experimental films that critically engaged existing archives, visualized a variety of forms of counter-history and diasporic lives.

Employing techniques of remixing, sampling, looping, and repetition and partly inspired by the US black radical tradition (Malcolm X, Black Power, the Black Panthers, and the Black Arts Movement), the collective’s work prompts conversations about collective artistic production at the intersection of political visibility, identity, and aesthetics. 

Research

At times, the Black Audio Film Collective’s visionary work anticipates aesthetic solutions that have become commonplace in the digital age. As John Akomfrah articulates, in the group’s work, the utopian was often imagined as a digital referent: on the one hand, the iconic figures and moments of the black US radical tradition had reached the group’s generation as some kind of “digital specters” – powerful, inspirational, necessary and yet removed. On the other hand, the very concept of the digital offered these filmmakers the hope for a different relationship to the archive. liquid blackness will focus on this “digitopia,” as Akomfrah has described it, is ripe for scholarly reflections on the possible impact of digitality in alternative forms of collective and historical imagination.

Echoing the work of the Black Audio Film collective, the “Fluid Radicalisms” research project comprises multiple critical studies of the archive. Exploring issues of history and memory, liquid blacknessmembers created a bibliography and two curatorial projects that use digital space to study the linksthat are inherent to the Black radical tradition as it is articulated throughout the diaspora.  

liquid blackness in Conversation with David Lawson (BAFC) and Eddie Chambers (UT at Austin)

Bibliography

Bailey, David A., Ian Baucom, and Sonia Boyce. Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2005.

Barker, Jennifer M. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. First Trade Paperback edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. 1st edition. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. 1 edition. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1997.

Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

González, Jennifer. “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice.” Camera Obscura 24, no. 1 70 (January 1, 2009): 37–65.

Hylton, Richard, ed. Donald Rodney: Doublethink. London: Autograph, 2003.

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light. 1 edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Mercer, Kobena. Keith Piper: Relocating the Remains. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1997.

Moten, Fred. In the Break : The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition / Fred Moten. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2003.

Curatorial Project: “Black Audio Film Collective Resource”

This experimental archive, curated by Kristin Juarez, aims to emphasize the potential insights into historical discourse that occur when the presumed logics of spatial and temporal linearity are destabilized. It uses a digital platform to allow the artists’ testimonies to touch, contrast, and overlap with each other. Driven by its content, the platform encourages a personal and evolving engagement with the voices that have refused to be contained within the interstices of historical discourse.

Curatorial Project: “The Black Radical Tradition Bibliography”

In preparation for theBlack Audio Film Collective film and discussion series, Cameron Kunzelman read a selection of works pertinent to understanding the black radical tradition as well as the uprisings that took place during the early 1980s in Britain. These uprisings were informed and generated by the shifting social tides of the postwar period. This selection of texts helps contextualize the social and political movements that erupted in activity during the 1980s, setting the scene for the artistic explorations and reflections of the Black Audio Film Collective’s work.

Publications

 
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liquid blackness 1, no. 4 “fluid radicalism” Contents

Another outcome of this research is the November 2014 issue of liquid blackness, “fluid radicalisms,” that investigates the trajectories of radical thought and art practice across the Black Atlantic. 

Alessandra Raengo - Introduction

Charles P. “Chip” Linscott – “The Ghosts of John Akomfrah”

Kristin Juarez – “Inside and Out: The Open Hand in the Work of Donald Rodney and Keith Piper”

Clinton Fluker – “Akomfrah’s Angel of History”

Cameron Kunzelman – “The Fluidity of Black Radicalism in 1980s Britain”

Abbas Barzegar – “Seeing and Reading Al-Islam: The Visual Rhetoric of the Islamic Party of North America’s Newspaper (1971-78)”