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A conceptual Black spectacle about the protests, COVID-19, and legacies of race, gender and sexuality
Slought and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce The Sis Uprising: A Critical Kiki, an online event on Thursday, October 8, 2020 from 5-7pm. The event is free and open to the public and will be broadcast live on YouTube.
In this program, Arien Wilkerson and their collaborators will present new and previous work to playwright Ricardo A. Bracho's creative writing workshop at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the greater Philadelphia community. The program will feature excerpts from previous performances, as well as the premiere of The Sis Uprising, a conceptual Black spectacle on COVID-19, the protests, and the interwoven legacies of race, gender, sexuality and Black queer artistic insurgency. As Wilkerson writes in their "A sissifesto," featured below, "The sis uprising is a visual aggregate, collective showing of the disconnection between realities and moments, present presences and parallel futures. I'm interested in adding to the narrative of what more do we do or what less do we do after all is said and done. The character is time. Not displaying time nor depicting time but abstractedly wearing time as skin. Whose skin is time in?"
Also discussed will be the video Shark, an unfinished work commissioned prior to the onset of COVID-19 that features Wilkerson and other Black men and femmes in solo, duo and trio shots interacting with each other, natural and built environments, the photographic eye and the embellishment of fabric. Shark is about the collective sojourn of Black peoples in the Americas but refuses to merely portray loss, trauma and survivance. As Bracho and Wilkerson describe the project, "Even as cop cars burn, gentrification removes us and remakes our cities for settlers, plagues hit us the hardest, Black people retain the right to touch and be touched, to cap on each other and make each other laugh, to meet each other's eyes; to feel and look beautiful beyond our devalued status and the impositions placed on us by racial capitalism."
Arien Wilkerson with Ricardo A. Bracho
The sis uprising is a visual aggregate, collective showing of the disconnection between realities and moments, present presences and parallel futures.
I'm interested in adding to the narrative of what more do we do or what less do we do after all is said and done. The character is time. Not displaying time nor depicting time but abstractedly wearing time as skin. Whose skin is time in?
The character IS time
The skin time IS in
- happens to be mine
In some or many ways
rotting then thriving.
The skin time is in – is black.
The skin time is in
is black
femme presenting
non binary
- non-attached not
alien nor human nor animal
yet spirited
in control.
My loneliness is another skin, a part of and apart from time and this skin I'm in.
I envision my loneliness as a beast, some sort of raging monster. I protect my insides, the heart it might hurt, the gut where it might nut. Inside of me: the guilt over what I have left, unsaid; the life goals not yet achieved. Financial gains, a new city and cute gigs yet still the EBT and hunger to not always be left with my want for more:
love, money, power.
The need for revenge and justice.
When the lives of Dominique, George, and Breonna were taken it's sad to say, I was restored.
Every single fiber and muscle in my body, restored..
Every organ and bone; birthmark and scar, restored.
I stayed black.
I became less alone.
Cop cars burned, tanks rolled, plagues continued.
I masked and marched and fucked.
What is it to be crucified and born again?
The sis uprising.