Sep 23, 2020 | TBA | Institute | Performance

American Chameleon: Syllabus for Peace

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

American Chameleon: The Living Installments

Co-Presented with FringeArts

American Chameleon: The Living Installments is a hybrid multimedia living artwork, instigated by Nigerian-American artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, that explores the ever-evolving ways in which digitality intersects with the fugitive realities and shapeshifting principles that Black queer people employ to survive and heal. The work also operates as a digital archive, a porous public performance in interactive pedagogy where Kosoko and collaborators seek to locate a space for healing both online and off. Kosoko and collaborators will host a series of events, including a film screening, discussion, and healing session, that aims to hold grief while also centering themes of liveness, beauty, humor, care, and joy.

The work operates as a flexible, digital commons. A pop-up community of organizers and practitioners centers adaptive interactive learning as a means of creating sustainable, multi-tiered networks of care. Occurring, in part, on the gaming platform Discord, The Living Installments is an experiment in creating a flexible space where Black voices feel comfortable thinking and speaking out loud. It’s a virtual venue for biomythographic* liveness conjuring chameleonic possibility and entanglement.

*“Biomythography” refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982, which combines history, biography, and myth, and holds a literary perspective that serves as a guiding light for complex narrative storytelling rooted in a queer, Black self-defined, feminist imagination.