The works asks:

• How can we understand the Anthropocene as a product of racism? (Yusoff, 2018)

• How can we attune to the relation between the halflives of nuclear waste and the afterlives of slavery? (Hartman, 2007)

• How can we refuse the binary of human time and geologic time by offering ritualized elongated mourning to racialized violence / earth violence? (Moten, Harney, 2016)

 

For a 12-hour epoch, Tokunow, Breeze, and Letcher will perform in an outdoor setting with and for geologic formations adjacent to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gathering and dispersing throughout the day, audiences are invited to enter into an experience of Black Geologic Time through their own durational witnessing of Butoh dance practice, by participating in on-site Black Studies and Anti-Nuclear teach-ins, and by engaging in communal rest and restoration practices that call upon traditions of the Black family picnic.

 

In a cultural moment racked with urgency, Stages of Tectonic Blackness invites us to move slowly in order to feel more deeply into this time. As a durational practice of Black queer resistance, this work prioritizes Black experience, Black time, Black bodies and our racialized relationship to the earth.

 

Tokunow shares, “Stages of Tectonic Blackness demands that we all link our liberation to each other and the earth, and in order to do so, we must slow down.”