Experiments in Supine Possibilities or “How we might use our position at the bottom to make a clear leap into revolutionary action” - The Combahee River Collective, 1979

In collaboration with Gallery of The Street’s 'we begin with play' #LetsGetStupid2020 abolitionist surrealist visual folk opera political circus laboratory and campaign stump tour we will be hosting a Fugitive Caucus that we’ve designed as an embodied citation lab — 7 days of communal experimentation from November 2nd - November 11th. This is an offering designed to invite us into contemplative practice in a season of great turmoil. It is our hope that this kind of engaged contemplation can hold and offer sustenance to our community.

Inspired by the Black radical tradition, Black surrealist aesthetics and the work we do together in Church, this lab asks participants to physically and spiritually reorient themselves to the political mandates of our radical black feminist demands for a new world. What happens if instead of facing each crisis ‘head on,’ we bear witness to it belly up? The body supine is a vulnerable thing, an open thing, an invitation for rest and the risk of invasion. We see Black bodies supine in death and in spectacle performances of protest like die-ins, but what of our most intimate acts of laying down? Informed by the intersection of Black feminism and Disability Justice, ‘Experiments in Supine Possibilities’ is an attempt to think and create from the Black disabled bodymind experience of the world in crisis. How many of us have been laid out by depression, fatigue, apathy, chronic pain in the face of these converging crises? How many of us are scared to lay down for fear we might not get back up? What happens when Abolitionist Strategy emanates from this place as opposed to from militant postures of self denial? 

Source Texts:

Marita Bonner, “To Be Young — A Woman — And Colored” (1925)

The Combahee River Collective Statement (1979)

Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (1980)

Saidiya Hartman, “The Plot of Her Undoing” (2020)

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, “Darkness is Asking to Be Loved” (2020)

This is an experiment in embodying the rhetorical position of the bottom. Asking: What if instead of fighting for center, we force a reorientation towards the bottom? Or what if we don’t force anything, we build from here -- allowing our backs something to rest on, training our eyes beyond the ceiling, roof, clouds, cosmos. Laying on the back refuses to offer it up as bridge. Supine Possibilities is an attempt at weaving together Harriet Tubman’s hyper-somnia  and Breonna Taylor’s stolen sleep. The Supine Possibilities Lab invites us to unthink surrender and pushes past the carceral limits of popular imagination. What outside of Justice can we/should we demand for fallen, forgotten and disappeared Black women (trans+Cis) and femmes? How do we complicate our notions of rest and individualist practices of retreat? Supine Possibilities invites slow contemplation of these questions through shared acts of intention around laying down and the recording of dreams, thoughts, feelings and curiosities upon rising. Supine Possibilities invites participants to see what happens when you fully avail yourself to the messages or silences of your body at rest.