Choreokratic Ecologies - An Archive of the Murmurations Project

Carlos Eduardo de Carvalho Mello

This exposition is an archival gesture emerging from the Dramaturgical Ecologies research-creation collective. Rooted in the entwined inquiries of Blacknesses and Dramaturgy, it gathers the dialogues, encounters and an artistic residency that unfolded through the SSHRC-funded Murmurations project. Between the viscous resonance of okra and the shifting flight of murmuring birds, this exposition shares choreokratic ecologies - a garden of study where movement, thought, and relation co-compose. Here, Blackness becomes a method, a lens, a refrain, challenging the neutrality of the performer-dancer body and inviting modes of collective creation that are relational, porous, and opaque. Murmurations attends to what forms in the formless - like a swarm of birds: a living archive of bodies, voices, and ecologies composing a landscape.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akomolafe, Bayo. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017.

Attar, Farid ud-Din. The Conference of the Birds. Translated by Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi. London: Penguin Classics, 1984.

Carney, Judith A., and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Chandler, N. On Paragraph Four of “The Conservation of Races”. CR The New Centennial Review, 14(3), 255-288. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/73n492s0, 2014.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. “Yam, Roots, and Rot: Allegories of the Provision Grounds.” In Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, 235–253. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. Base Faith. e-flux Journal 86 (2017): 1–7.SMU Institutional Knowledge+1

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. Formless Formation. Wivenhoe / New York: Minor Compositions 2021.minorcompositions.info+1

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. Refusing Completion: A Conversation. e-flux Journal 116 (2021).Essex Open Access Research Repository+1

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. On Birds & Kitchen Tables. Minor Compositions, 2023

Manning, Erin. Out of the Clear. Wivenhoe / New York: Minor Compositions, 2022.minorcompositions.info+1

Smith, Chris. The Whole Okra: A Seed to Stem Celebration. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019.Rizzoli New York+1

Thompson, Tonika Sealy and Hareny, Stefano. Ground provisions. (2018). Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. 120-125. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5901

Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” In Savacou 5 (1971): 95–102. Reprinted in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, 143–153. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990.

Tip

Tip