Resume at the Point of Interruption
Year: 2022

2-channel, digital video, HD; 4 projectors, media players, suspended jumbotron screens, speakers, subwoofer

Duration: 30 mins 52 sec

Resume at the Point of Interruption is an experiemntal portrait about the reservoirs of resiliency and the worlds it enables through the body, improvisation, and spirituality. Serving as an emerging archive of Black life, the film establishes documentary and sonic forms as a space for storytelling and preservation.

Ania Szremski:

This experimental documentary, which lends the exhibition its title, follows Black individuals—including the artist—as they intuit and improvise their ways through the world. In the chapter on washington-queen, we see the queer nonbinary photographer receiving hormone replacement therapy and meditating on themes of gender, difference, constraint, and freedom, and how they experienced the limits and possibilities of all those things while playing basketball growing up and negotiating their identity as an adult.

Combining photography, moving image, and archival material, this multipart video portrait draws from personal accounts and broader histories stitched together with textual sources, including the talk “Transgender Solidarity” by counselor and theologian Pamela Ayo Yetunde and poet Kevin Young’s 2012 The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. In his collection of essays illustrating Black strategies of storytelling, lying, and improvising, Young writes, crucially: “If we cannot first imagine freedom, we cannot actually achieve it. Freedom, like fiction and all art, is a process in which the dream is only the first part.”

As we start to imagine freedom, washington-queen observes here, there may not be a clear blueprint to follow. Resume at the Point of Interruption illustrates how the Black figure, tasked with envisioning a new and different future, responds to obstacles, conflicts, crossroads, and threats with gestures—a fake-out, a doubling-back, a pivot—that may appear illogical, but which are in fact the creative gestures that will allow them to chart a course to elsewhere.

Participants (by appearance)
dana washington-queen
Inpu Ka Mut
Racha Tahani Lawler Queen
Colin “Versis” Palmer

Additional Recordings
“Poem for South African Women”
By June Jordan

“Transgender Solidarity”
By Pamela Ayo Yetunde
Appears courtesy of Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Liberate Meditation

Credits
Camera: dana washington-queen
Video Editor: dana washington-queen
Composer/Sound Design/Sound Editor: John Dombroski
Motion Capture VFX: Markus Clipper

Songs (by appearance)

“No Problem” (part 2 drum solo)
Performed by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers

“Mabhongo”
Performed by Miriam Mekeba
Engineered & Mixed by Josh Abbey
Mastered by Ted Jensen
From the album Sangoma

“Untitled” (Traditional Zulu Sangoma Ceremonial Song)
Percussion by Racha Tahani Lawler Queen
Maracas by dana washington-queen

“v.”
Performed by Versis
Written by Versis
Produced by T. Hemingway & SWARVY
From the album Versis

“Travelin’”
Performed by Versis
Written by Versis
Produced by T. Hemingway
Mastered by Dave Cooley
Mixed by Jordan Lee
From the album iLLCANDESCENT

“do what i do” (a’capella performance)
Performed by Versis
Written by Versis
Produced by SWARVY
Mixed & Mastered by SWARVY
From the album Anti-Anxiety

“AMÁNDOTE”
Performed by Versis
Written by Versis
Produced by SWARVY
Executive Produced by TOKAYO
Mastered by SWARVY
From the album VíA DEL SOL

"potion"
Performed by lojii & SWARVY featuring Versis
Written by Avery Domingo, Colin Palmer, and Mark Sweeney
From the album DUE RENT
Appears courtesy of Fresh Selects

“Untitled” (drum solo 1959)
Performed by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
Recorded at Au Théâtre Des Champs-Élysées

“You’ve Got to Have Freedom”
Performed by Pharoah Sanders Quintet /Pharoah Sanders
From the album Africa