Part of the 2024-25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:
A Conversation on Black Archives [Virtual Event]
Black Archives is a “gathering place for Black memory and imagination.” Charlie is a research-based visual artist and author of Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life (2023). Current project: In the summer of 1977, the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress established the South-Central Georgia Folklife Project. Cherlise’s work examines the fieldwork practice of Dr. Beverly J. Robinson, educator, and folklorist, who documented the communities and traditions of rural southern Georgia.
Renata Cherlise is a research-based visual artist and author of Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life (2023). Cherlise uses various mediums to explore themes of identity, family, and culture. Her work seamlessly bridges her Southern upbringing with contemporary methodologies in digital and physical spaces while reimagining notions of the Black experience. Her archival project, Black Archives, has evolved from a photo-based website of visual narratives into a collaborative platform featuring archival histories and modern-day stories from across the African diaspora.
2024-25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:
In this series, we highlight the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019) The reparative labor of re-memory invites us to recognize the ways that we are intimately bound up with undocumented or under-documented histories and the urgent need for "reconstituting and recollecting a usable past.” Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, whose work seeks to redress the historical amnesia and “dismemberment” of the colonial enterprise, sees memory as “the site of dreams, and of desire, is thus crucial to the construction of our being.”
From Yohance Lacour, whose audio documentary work You Didn’t See Nothin deftly weaves memoir and investigative reporting, recontextualizing and reexamining the impact of a hate crime on the south side of Chicago and on the life of Lacour himself, to documentary filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes, whose films enact multiple forms of participatory authorship to create narratives that emerge as a third space wherein the hidden poetry of marginalized communities can flourish; to scholar Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis takes the Maya creation story, The Popol Vuh, and explores its history and relevance in contemporary moments of crisis,; to Renata Cherlise, writer, artist, and founder of Black Archives, a “gathering place for Black memory and imaginations,” we will engage in conversations on listening, authorship, and knowledge-keeping. As Thiong'o asserts, “Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices.”
Events will take place on Thursday evenings (ET) from 6-7:00PM and will either be virtual or in-person.