safehouse ii. x ariella tai (2019, digital video)
When did you last feel free? Did you ever? Is freedom a destination? Are we, as black femmes, allowed freedom? Who denies it? Who grants it to us?
ariella tai’s safehouse delivers us to safety - a largely unseen world created by Black women and queer people daily. The safehouse is in your bathtub, in the chest of your community, in the twisting, threading, and moisturizing fingers of you and your Black kin.
- via “We Keep Us Safe”, kiki nicole on “safehouse ii.”
safehouse ii uses video, sound and text to consider blackness, social (dis)order, refusal and the compulsions to labor as they exist in relationship to care work. Using Saidiya Hartman’s transformative work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments to think through the absence of black stories, particularly the stories of black women and queer people, from the archive, this video seeks to speculate on a small alternate world in a system of institutionalized care built on carceral logics. How do we conceive the daily work that goes into healing epigenetic and systemically reified trauma? How do we build alternate systems, habitats and ways of being in the Wake? What rituals, methods, intimacies do we create in the spaces between ourselves and those who came before us?