PRACTICES IN BUILDING
BLACK QUEER FUTURITY
by Sibahle Serpent Daniel
About the film:
film assignment ‘experimental film • UK • 3:21 • English
practices in building black queer futurity is a transpilled experimental film that interrogates the future and survival of black queerness through personal reflection, automated editing features, generative AI and vision board making. It begins with a reading from Envisioning Utopia: The Aesthetics of Black Futurity (2019), a thesis by Sydney Haliburton that investigates how music and performance by black women artists contributes to black placemaking and future-building as the artists explore trauma, vulnerability, healing and black absurdism through the aesthetics of their work. This reading is layered on top of a poem I wrote in 2021 titled To Spaces That Contain Us Heart And Soul. This poem, written as a prayer, is shifted to a lower pitch so that the reader has a deeper more masculine voice. The volume of the poem is also decreased to a mumble to resemble the intention of the poem as prayer.
These are the softwares and websites used in the making of project:
ChatGPT: For further speculation on black queer futurity and reinforcing black trans rhetoric into AI systems.
MyHeritage: For face masculinisation.
PicsArt: For digitally manipulating images.
D-ID: For animating speech in 2D images.
3dpresso: For botched 3D model.
Bibliography:
Haliburton, S. 2019. "Envisioning utopia: the aesthetics of black futurity". College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. Accessed: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/283.
About the filmmaker:
Sibahle Serpent Daniel (they/he) is a multidisciplinary artist of South African origin who uses filmmaking, writing and photography to document and celebrate black joy and gender euphoria. Furthermore, Serpent’s process is informed by an ode to the elders who’ve nurtured them – uMam’Siya, uMankomo noZotsho. Their practice has now grown to include autoethnographic accounts, archival research, and community engagement through their education in BA Anthropology and Visual Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His practice is work that is tender and fierce, continuously evolving and changing form.
Instagram: @hoodwhimsy