Impediment is Information

14 minutes, single-channel video, 2021

Directed, shot, and edited by JJJJJerome Ellis. Music by JJJJJerome Ellis.

Voiceovers by Roshaya Rodness, m. nourbeSe philip, and Maria Stuart.

Created during 2021 ISSUE Project Room artist residency.

Full video available on request.

Presentations:

Fugitive Speech, Oklahoma Contemporary, Nov 3, 2022 - April 30, 2023

Voicings, Artspace (New Haven, CT), Feb 11, 2023 - April 15, 2023

Choralités, Centre d’art de la Maison populaire (Montreuil, France), May 17, 2023 - July 13, 2023

[Speaking in Foreign Language], Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY), October 17, 2023

Shot on location in the Bighorn Mountains (Wyoming) and Badlands National Park (South Dakota).

This music-video-poem work centers on an 18th century newspaper advertisement for the recapture of a fugitive slave with "an impediment in his speech." A handheld camera captures blurry conifers; a saxophone prays to a mountain. By rearranging the words of the advertisement to create lines of poetry, I am seeking new meanings and sites of resistance in the archive. The work premiered on Juneteenth, a day that recognizes the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. In creating this work for the occasion of Juneteenth, I wanted to celebrate Black freedom practices. I think these practices divinely exceed official proclamations, emancipatory and otherwise.