Those African persons in ‘Middle Passage’ were literally suspended in the ‘oceanic,’ if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: […] these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all.

— Hortense Spillers

In this work, voice is fragmented, analyzed, and resynthesized in order to, as Alexander Weheliye puts it, “stage the body of information and technology” — domains in which the black body’s presence has often been denied. A pyramid rises from the sea: once used to house the dead, then the dreams of the living, now only empty space.

Attributions

This piece uses the sample waves_onrocks_02.flac by cajo, and a hoodie model by dragon_child.