top of page
Censual Spillage
National Communication Assocation Conference, Top Contributed Performance
New Orleans, Lousiana 2022
Filmed at my home
in South Central Los Angeles,
Censual Spillage aims to locate
the census in a historically
colonial
and
watery archive.
Considering the form's
entanglement with
oceanic enterprise
and
human flesh,
I find that the census meets you at home
for black folks the census haunts us with it’s prerogative of human stocktaking.
In conversation with Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, and Lisa Lowe this performance asks viewers, what does it feel like to hold space “within and beyond” colonialism?
How do we grieve a flesh that feels like it dies a little the moment it becomes intelligible
to the state?
Looking to the racial categories of the 2020 census, we find change for the black category- the option to
“fill-in-the box”
It’s important to note, that was previously only available to
American Indian
and
Asian/Pacific Islander categories
what I find is ample room for performance
ample space for repetitions with difference
Using activated charcoal Censual Spillage comes into contact with the ink that marks human existence. From a particularly black lens, performance explores the possibilities for subjectivity offered in the "fill-in-the-blank" categories on the census form.
Given the precarity of race and the possibility for liberatory expression a blank box offers, this performance finds becoming occurs in a porous place; a site of intra-action where accompaniment, mourning, and plurality are all vehicles for transformation.
Censual Spillage ultimately posits the categories used to claim the body spill over in racial excess; that is, a fleshy surplus that simultaneously sustains and disrupts''.
*content warning- depictions of drowning*
bottom of page