We Keep Us Safe: ariella tai’s‘safehouse’
by kiki nicole
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.
We first see tai’s two subjects in disjointed scenes, images that hint at the interior but don’t let us all the way in. They are then seen in action laboring in nature, harvesting plants and herbs shoulder to shoulder. At once, this feels both ancestral and contemporary. The intermittent glitches and overlay of narration from Saidiya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” interrupts their work as much as Black Life interrupts fugitivity with inherent freedom. “The dangerous music of open rebellion,” Saidiya writes as narrated by artist and writer jayy dodd, pours in a distorted mix as the narration stacks additional narration and tremelos of Blues sounds with a steady rain drip. The celestial yet disruptive sound and pink glitches rattle reality through reality in live time. Almost as if in a time lapse, their “collective refusal” continues simultaneously and throughout the work. The home scenes - the tub full of tracks, the lounge seating where hair is braided with care - are juxtaposed with tall grasses in the background. The pair glitches from the field to the safehouse and loops in the kitchen as the herbs previously collected are hung and dried amongst food scraps and half filled martini glasses. We are honored to see the pair in rest, one that seems long overdue. It becomes clear that even in the escape of the interior, pleasure and care does not come by lightly.
They bathe themselves and each other and cleanse the air, soap up their tracks, and pour their drinks in the water they themselves soak in. They pour one out and languish as if living ancestors. What feeds [our ancestors], feeds us, too. What “beauty and wretchedness,” we hear overlayed through these scenes. Limbs lay heavy intertwined in their blackness and neon glitch. It is here we recognize that even the interior may not be truly safe. There’s something more to the clutter of the kitchen and the living room, to the collective sway at the end of the film as if to keep oneself calm, to the midday collapse on the sofa cushions that read more than exhaustion. Care work and vulnerability in the midst of fugitivity, in the perceived escape from misogynoir, in the break of trauma - is extremely hard work.
So then, we are here. Out of body and into the static, ungrounded. How many of us wouldn’t even dare play at security until alone in our own homes, out of mixed company, until we are not working for the benefit of anyone else but us and our own. And there is joy in this. This interruption of oppression. It’s precious how joy - how freedom - feels so unstable.
Precious, too, to anoint your kin’s scalp with oils and let loose your braids. To close your eyes fully and lean your head back into the spread legs of your sxster as they plait your tender head. What a pleasure it is to keep us growing. What great work it is to keep us safe.
****kiki nicole is a multimedia artist based in North Carolina. They are a 2016 Pink Door Fellow, a 2018 Fellow of The Watering Hole, & a 2018 Winter Tangerine Fellow. They work to explore a Black, queer, femme & genderless universe that un/bodies, un/genders, & re/news, with a focus on identity & mental illness. They are a co-curator & collaborator of Portland-based experimental film & new media arts project, the first and the last, which seeks to archive, uplift, & nourish new media & experimental work from Black women, femmes, & non-men through film screenings & skill shares. kiki hopes to lend a voice for the void in which Black femmes not only exist in plain view, but thrive. Find them at kikinicole.com or in the corner of the club with a book.