✦ The Sojourner Project

What does frequency offer us as a framework for understanding black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-blackness? And how might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of black life’s irrepressible drive toward creating a different kind of futurity?

At a moment of transnational racial reckoning, this listening session explores black frequency as a site of possibility. It engages black frequency in multiple forms: as a sonic space the ranges from silence to deafening, dissonant noise; as a register of rapture and spirituality; as a temporal feedback loop of memory, repetition, and renewal; as a dynamic relation of call and response or chorus and verse; as a haptic and kinetic space of contact and connection across the African continent and its various diasporas.

Frequencies of Blackness is an invitation to explore black frequency through dialogue on sight, sound, memory, movement, and connection. The conveners of the session, Tina Campt, Zara Julius, Jenn Nkiru and Alexander Weheliye, have assembled a collection of sonic and haptic, written and visual texts that enact black frequency in a multitude of ways. We invite you to peruse them in our media lab and our library and to join the conversation at their listening session on November 20th at 6pm SAST/12pm EST. Join us in a space where we will listen and learn, screen and spin, talk and reflect.

Materials