I love exploring existential topics by way of art-objects. Thus, I write about aesthetics and ontology. If you are curious about how images, language and broader cultural phenomena structure the conditions of our everyday lives, and how those conditions mediate the making of said cultural forms, you are in the right place.
It bears noting that “For Opacity” is not a traditional arts writing blog. There are no limits as to what you will find here because there are no limits to my curiosity. Some writings are more formal than others, some are culled straight from my journal or notes app and read like a stream of consciousness, whereas others take an explicitly analytical approach. Regardless of the form or tone, know that every word you will find here is invested in Black futures.
The title of this container, “For Opacity,” is borrowed from philosopher Edouard Glissant’s essay by the same name, in which he articulates the value (both personal and political) of withholding one’s interiority and, by extension, of granting ourselves permission to be fundamentally misunderstood by and illegible to systems that are predicated on a perception of non-white subjects as transparent and entirely knowable (and therefore also commodifiable, surveil-able and controllable). What might be possible then if we practice our lives with opacity as a starting point? What might be possible if the systems we rail against can no longer find, let alone flatten us?
Since encountering the essay, the notion of opacity has become one of the primary apparatuses through which I construct a life that takes a form I can live blissfully within. This idea animates how I love, feel, relate, speak, think, conspire, refuse, rebel, do, be and, of course, how and what I write.
