Empirical Evidence! a Requiem for WoeKill. [danielle deadwyler]

This is an experiment in coming apart. And a practice in durational digital assemblage.  A new level of vulnerability. A deconstructed humanity.

Blackness, womanhood, and motherhood are themes critical to my practice. They are sites where I often question vulnerability, performance, hiphop, as well as labor and its impact on the black body through race, class, gender and sexuality. I am often testing these themes in public performances of endurance, on pedestrian sites and roadways. My work has largely been anonymous in these spaces, utilizing elaborate masks, enabling observers to locate personal narratives and close relationship identities onto my performing body.

I encounter roadkill often in my preparation for these works, walking Atlanta streets I’ve known all my life. Roadkill has fascinated me since my concept of death has grown and shifted as a child. I’d often wrecklessly evade the open bodies of squirrels, dogs, and deer; compelled by the shift from life to death, but overwhelmed by the blood, despair on the body. These beings died …and were left, open, mangled in the roadway? People, in their cars, drive past unbothered. There is no funeral. There is no wake. And they continue to drive over the body, literally, until it is merged into asphalt greys and blacks. Unrecognizable. Forgotten.

What does it mean to be exposed and forgotten, or shifted to unrecognizable shapes? Does that body shift its life in its death? What beauty can you find in a body exposed? What are the factors that shape this exposure?

You can’t hide in death. You can’t hide when your guts are bursting out. I wanted to document a process of vulnerability, of shifting and healing- a rebirthing in a personal ‘death’. Via the selfie, I wanted to explore the beauty in loss and challenge in the labor of my black woman body. Outside of anonymity. There will be no erasure of this exposed grief moving body. These are some effects of being woman, black, and mother.

Empirical Evidence! Requiem for Woekill. is a deconstructed experimental short film. You can put it back together if you want. Or you can look at each of its parts, exposed, in the street, one part by one part, or two, or all three.

Thank you to Jessica Caldas, Jihan Sherman, and Chelsea Dunn for their love and support on this project.

|artist statement|

With filmmaking, poetry and performance art as primary media, filtered through experimental and theatrical exhibition structures, public/private work (or endurance), gender/sexuality and hiphop, and public performance/community dialogue, are content central to my practice.

My work explores how lines are blurred in the work of black women, especial are domestic and sexual work, and the impact the work has on the black body. Family and social ranking as intertwined or offsprings to the black body are of interest as well, and polysemy as vocal, sonic and performative subjects in black female livelihood.  I’m interested in marrying black women subjects to live performance engagement in local communities. Creating space for interfacing with black female subjectivity as a daily being, as a pedestalized marvel in live performances and in film works and lyrical play.

| all content is property of the artist |