There is only one way to get out… All together now!
A conversation between Logan Dandridge and Alejandra Labastida

Alejandra Labastida (AL):
I want to start by saying I believe you when you say this journey is governed by rhythm. But I also have a confession: my appeal to your work is not merely curatorial or aesthetic, I suspect I am also looking for some guidance. Allow me to present a context: the number of disappeared persons in Mexico has reached 90,043, mostly since President Felipe Calderón declared war to the drug lords in 2006. In the last decade 3,241 female teenagers (between 12 and 17 years) have disappeared, an average of nine per day[1]. While the government battles to barely keep the count with minimum data, NGO’s have worked to gather as much information as possible regarding the victims: age, gender, socioeconomic background, school grade, etc., but the category of race never appears! When I confronted one of the NGO’s about it, they said they simply didn’t have the data available. The forces that hide and deny racist violence in this country have deep roots in a complex ideological operation: Mexican national identity was created around the concept of the mestizo as a key component of the construction of the Mexican State from the last decades of the nineteenth century up to the 40’s. I will not dwell on it, but an oversimplification of this big lie would sounds like this: there is no racism in Mexico because we are all mestizos. When you ask in your video “How many black futures will end before they begin?”, there is no doubt your question is centered in the racist structures that end these futures, and that is precisely the big absence in the question of  “how many Mexican futures will end before they begin?” We have a long way to go to, at least, introduce the racial dimension of the massacres we are witnessing. You seem to have some kind of plan, some intuitive strategy to navigate memorial pathways into the present and future without getting paralyzed, can you talk us into it so we can maybe sing along?

Logan Dandridge (LD): Guidance is a curious place to begin and it’s helpful to consider the context you’ve added. I’m no stranger to the paralysis of racialized violence. It feels both perpetually new in the way that this violence lingers through every step or, as Christina Sharpe puts it “wake work” that we are continuously occupied by, but it also feels eerily ancient and therefore somewhat haunting. Yet I’m exceedingly happy that you’ve connected this tumult to a collective practice like singing. Yes, we must sing, dance, and shout our way through. It’s what our ancestors would’ve wanted. I like to think about memory like a charm. It isn’t that there is any inherent purity or wickedness in the thing itself. That power lies in its application. For black folks memory can be articulated into positive and negative systems of value. There was a performance by Erykah Badu where she sang that “memory is good unless it leads to fear.” I’ve never quite agreed with her sentiment, but it could just be an issue of syntax rather than an outright refusal of the idea. And so there’s certainly a precarity to memory that I’m mindful of, because the brutality leaves such a thick residue. Nevertheless, there is also a certain mysticism that I've encountered in relation to these memorial pathways that doesn't feel all that dissimilar to magic. Almost like leaping onto a psychological tramway that carries you through time. If you can imagine a more liberated space for black people, indigenous people, an anti-racist space, an anti-colonial space, wouldn’t this realm need access to all spheres of memory, not just what brings joy?

Something I’ve returned to this week is this quote by Nam June Paik to the effect of “the culture that will survive in the future is the culture that you can carry around in your head.” Memory is utilized out of necessity as a tool of preservation. I’m trying to imagine memory less as a human or as a synaptic behavior, and more as a radical and transformative black phenomenon. Memory in this sense is vital to preserving heritage, language, art and other cultural forms of expression. Even though there is obviously trauma and violence entangled in that history, it’s all necessary. All of that gorgeously complicated language must be retained.

AL: You have conformed a “library of survival” (sorry, can’t help myself from stealing your eloquent titles and texts) made by a kind of “DNA of images” that repeat themselves through your videos with different permutations: historic images, images of the universe, surveillance cameras footage, athletes and dancers in action, the sounds and gestures of prayer and political speech, etc. Are you jamming with them? Have they become musical notes? And if so, what notes are the images of the universe? How closely can you evoke the universe before the illusion is broken? What is revealed in the rhythm of the coming together of these images?

LD: You’ve captured it so well already. All of the permutations feel really fragile sometimes—this dance of atoms is liquid. And the material in the work does sort of lead you into, above, and within the shroud of another world, or potentially into a magnified series of fragments that exist within our world. I can’t really say, but I began this work trying to identify the landmarks of our civilization. And in that process of identification, I started to understand that some of the sequencing of the images tries to get at how we’ve come to encounter African American narratives and the Black icons that dominate those images, how we could approach them more radically, which is to say experimentally. Maybe alternate histories aren’t only appropriate for science fiction? I know David Lynch would agree. I think these new concepts of narrativity could be utilized to explore a deeper polemic that critiques hegemonic institutions and the violence they inflict on the disenfranchised. At the very core, this is what I hope is revealed or at least referenced through the simultaneity of images and sounds.

At a certain point I want the illusion to be something you’re confronted with, and in some sense lead you into questioning the medium itself. Film is another obvious illusion I frequently interrogate. There are so many layers and so many songs being hummed on a loop. Honestly, I’m always in some sort of rhythmic trance. Frequently I listen to music in waves. So last week I was spinning the most recent SAULT album and this week I’m tearing through Midnight Marauders. Whether it’s P-Funk, Earl Sweatshirt, Coltrane, Etta James, D’Angelo, Rosetta Tharpe, Curtis Mayfield, etc. The jam is infinite.

AL: Most of our general public might not be familiar with the multiple historical agents and moments of this library, that wouldn’t need an explanation in the United States. Could you share with us the main references included in Reprise and Black Continuum?

LD: There are several that I’ve pulled from pretty repeatedly in those films. I’ll list them here:
1962: Malcolm X addressing police brutality during a gathering of Black Muslim leaders. 
1964: Play Dutchman, by Amiri Baraka (aka Le Roi Jones)
1966: Huey Newton describes abusive police discrimination in California.
1967: Civil Rights activist Stokely Carmichael speech at Tougaloo College “We Ain’t Goin’”
1968: Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party describing the police killing of Bobby Hutton.
1968: Tommie Smith and John Carlos performing Black Power Salute at Mexico City’s Olympics.
1969: Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the State of Illinois Black Panther Party speaks   on revolution and racism.
1970: Angela Davis discussing violence and revolution during a hunger strike in prison.
1972: Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm declares her Presidential bid.

There are also quick snippets of Sam Cooke singing, John F. Kennedy’s speech at the White House, Muhammad Ali speaking during an interview, Martin Luther King Jr. receiving a strange hand gesture that mimicked a gunshot, Arthur Ashe winning at Wimbledon in 1975, ScHoolboy Q music video, the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, Colin Kaepernick kneeling, protests in New Orleans, and Gil Scott-Heron reciting a poem in front of the Washington monument in Washington D.C.

AL: There seems to be a clear time frame in your library of images, at least when it comes to historic images that I believe don’t go further than the fifties (please correct me if I am wrong). The other side of this frame, the future, opens a spatial vanishing point into space, flirting with Afrofuturism. Can you talk about this? Maybe I got it all wrong.

LD: I like this observation a lot. Sometimes in the intersections between images, text, and sound I want to try and remove myself from the world to find what lies beyond it. I’m starting to utilize moving images less as tools for provocation, and more as methods of discovery. All astronauts seem like wizards to me, and this begins to realize some of that mysticism that I was describing earlier. Perhaps this colludes my understanding of time a bit. I think a lot about the potential for films that don’t operate by a traditional interpretation of order or linearity. There seems to be a function to this freedom that is liberating in the obvious sense, and also offers a glimpse into what is happening between the margins, which tends to be quite a lot in the experimental films that I love and have been heavily influenced by. It also suggests the potential for the work to operate in a liminal space that feels a bit more gestural in a formal way and less anticipatory in terms of the storytelling. This way time isn’t a framework that binds everything like a border. It can be like a drum beat that leaves spaces for us to dance between. Personally, I prefer dancing.  


[1] https://www.animalpolitico.com/2021/07/mexico-90-mil-desaparecidos-no-localizados/