The Evolution of mama [rose.]

mama [rose.] is an afro-futurist queer, circular time-traveling performance piece following three familial relationships and their journeys toward acknowledging and addressing intergenerational wounds. In part autoethnographic, as a black queer non-binary filmmaker, poet, playwright, performer, theologian and educator, this piece incorporates my family history and memories as retold by my 97-year-old grandmother. I also incorporate my surrealist sensibilities in reimagining black familial relationality. 

Through VHS archives of past-present-future times, an eighty-nine-year old trans archaeologist and oracle, Mama Rose, transmits indigenous wisdom and ways of knowing to her grandchild, a sixteen-year-old non-binary teen named Sid, as Sid navigates their own becoming and transforming relationship to their mother, Delores. These archives, based on research and documentation of lived experiences, provide glimpses into the lacunae, the silences, that exist in black folx histories. 

Though this project was conceived as a live theatrical choreopoem, Covid-19 safety protocol returned me to film, and I re-explored the work as experimental. I believe short film is the future of black queer performance. Film, as ritual, has the ability to produce new knowledge and affects each time it is watched and rewatched. It can also be widely distributed and downloaded for new contexts and purposes. My short experimental films offer a kaleidoscopic effect. Frames are altered or obscured to stitch together new landscapes, sensoria and realities. 

Each kaleidoscopic frame lives like a separate square in a basket. I choose a square to stitch with another (from a different but resonant time and place) like a quilt. Quilting has then become a tool within the editing/post-production process. Quilting is a multiply potent metaphor because it was used as insurgent practice to send coded messages during the period of enslavement. My kaleidoscope/quilted films become speculative in this way, applying afro-fabulation, storytelling, rhythm, movement and curiosity.