Open Space Residency: Don’t Cry For Me // Explorations in Liberation

By Rebby Yuer Foster & Marcel Mawulorm Johansen
Don’t Cry For Me is the post-death embarking of the soul to the underworld. After traveling along one of the seven rivers, the soul is greeted by 3 judges: Rhadamanthus, Minos, & Aeacus. It is they who determine the soul’s fate, based on the deeds performed by the mortal in their previous life. Let us perform our life for them to witness. Let the judgement begin.
Explorations in Liberation is an ongoing artistic investigation into what liberation can look and feel like in a black man’s body. If the chains are in your mind, can you free yourself with the very same? And what of the body? Frantz Fanon’s musings on liberation, in conversation with Bell Hooks’ analysis of patriarchy’s effects on Black men spark the question: How do we invite more vulnerability into the Black male experience, and how does society respond to the liberation of such a highly policed body? Where are we allowed to be vulnerable, soft, sensual and authentic? Before we were “man” before we were “black”, what did the body know to be, want to be, and how did it seek to express? If we were to be baptised in the primordial soup from whence we came, what limitations would fall away to allow us to be born anew; or perhaps to allow the emergence of something old, and true?