Having read the project description of ‘Disembodied Territories’ I was immediately reminded of Katherine Mckittrick’s reflection on Dionne Brand’s text ‘Land to Light On’. In the introductory chapter of ‘Demonic Grounds’ she reflects on how Brand’s work “not only refuses a comfortable belonging to nation, or country, or a local street, she alters them by demonstrating that geography, the material world, is infused with sensations and distinct ways of knowing” (Mckittrick, 2006: ix). Based on this reflection, and the themes and questions that ‘Disembodied Territories’ seeks to navigate, I am interested in offering a visual and sonic, black feminist experimental cinematic exploration of relationships between black subjectivity and black, migratory geographies as a way to rethink, remap and visualise the oppositional geographies of urban Johannesburg.
Through an experimental black feminist cinematic grammar that centres intimacy and an ordinary set of affects, I am interested in exploring the formation of black femme geographies (in the context of migration) amongst the violent, masculinised constructions of urbanity. Loosely based on previous ethnographic research, current research, as well as my own experience of the city, I hope to turn to the possibilities of experimental cinematic practice as a means to unearth the intimate relationships that shape these physical and imaginative oppositional geographies. This practice also centres relationships between black cinematic temporality and sonic frequencies to shape a filmic practice that refuses chronological time and favours a tense-less impermanence, perpetual restlessness and fragmentation (Campt, 2017 & Nyong’o, 2018). Through these provocations, I aim to construct a black feminist reading of the cinematic and the geographic to consider a nuanced language for thinking about black women and femme bodies enacting resistance though the everyday, intimate sites outside of Western, hegemonic constructions of space.
Through an experimental black feminist cinematic grammar that centres intimacy and an ordinary set of affects, I am interested in exploring the formation of black femme geographies (in the context of migration) amongst the violent, masculinised constructions of urbanity. Loosely based on previous ethnographic research, current research, as well as my own experience of the city, I hope to turn to the possibilities of experimental cinematic practice as a means to unearth the intimate relationships that shape these physical and imaginative oppositional geographies. This practice also centres relationships between black cinematic temporality and sonic frequencies to shape a filmic practice that refuses chronological time and favours a tense-less impermanence, perpetual restlessness and fragmentation (Campt, 2017 & Nyong’o, 2018). Through these provocations, I aim to construct a black feminist reading of the cinematic and the geographic to consider a nuanced language for thinking about black women and femme bodies enacting resistance though the everyday, intimate sites outside of Western, hegemonic constructions of space.
Anna Sango
is a photographer, spatial practitioner and film student based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her photographic work explores the complexities of the Johannesburg inner-city, capturing the liminal, still and in-flux nature of this environment. More broadly, her work explores every day, and personal, urban narratives of displacement, transnationalism and formations of subjectivity/being in relation to these processes. Black feminist and queer methodologies and practices are central to her research and creative practice. She is currently completing an MA in Film and Television, at the University of the Witwatersrand, with a research focus on black feminist geographies and experimental cinema.