Lazarus Taxa is an audiovisual lecture that meditates on and tends to Black performance and performativity. Students of this lecture (and the networks of thought it speaks alongside) are invited to engage a visual-sonic pedagogy that explores the slippages between ‘the minstrel’, ‘black (social) death’, black interiority and life, and the improbability of teasing these apart: The entanglement of the periphery with the centre, and the never-ending loop in reckoning with the magnitude of loss bound in this conundrum. This lecture is somewhere between aesthetics and affect, but not firmly rooted in either. It explores both the incapacity to articulate, and that which is outside of articulation, and leans into a transposition of the Black Sonic onto the visual. The Black Sonic is as much about affect and aesthetics and life and frequency as it is about time, the reclamation of time outside. It is a nod to the ways looping, and echo, and repetition are not synonyms of one-another, but rather distinct extensions of a particular sonic logic that extends a lifeline that simultaneously transports and undoes frequency. A lifeline that blurs and bends around the need to articulate. The lecture material is there to suggest modes of feeling, but it is not prescriptive.

*Lazarus Taxa was commissioned by POOL for their Tentacularity, Knotting and World-Making exhibition