Discovered: Playing in the Dark: Watery Experiments

Curated by Chrystel Oloukoï

Playing in the Dark engages the various ways in which blackness haunts the sea and is haunted by the sea. Borrowing from Toni Morrison, "playing in the dark" references the subdued Africanist presence which mediates imaginations of water in the wake of variegated yet entangled transoceanic slave trades but also takes seriously darkness as a subversive ecological milieu, against lures of transparency. In the works gathered here, nothing is left untouched by the confounding qualities of water and its corrosive opacities, from bodies to the environment, to the materiality of film itself. As such, "playing in the dark" also references attempts in Black experimental filmmaking to chart paths in which cameras do not write with light but probe shadows in search of "an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance" (Glissant, Poetics of Relation).


Screening Line-Up

By the Sea
Toney W. Merritt, 1982, 3 minutes, color, silent, 16mm

What the Water Said Nos 1-3
David Gatten, 1998, 16 minutes, color, sound, 16mm

Aqua
Samba Félix N'diaye, 1989, 12 minutes, color, sound, 16mm transferred to digital video

The Dislocation of Amber
Hussein Shariffe, 1975, 32 minutes, color, sound, 16mm transferred to digital video

Giverny I (Négresse Impériale)
Ja'Tovia Gary, 2017, 6 minutes, color, sound, digital video

Pattaki
Everlane Moraes, 2019, 21 minutes, color, sound, digital video

What the Water Said Nos 4-6
David Gatten 2006-2007, 17 minutes, color, sound, 16mm

Towards the Colonies
Miryam Charles, 2016, 5 minutes, color, sound, digital video

Song for the New World
Miryam Charles, 2021, 9 minutes, color, sound, digital video


Approximate running time: 121 min