Breaking Form: Practices of Black visuality and Sonority 

Realizing that things are     because      things are connected. 

In the spaces between, 

we create. 

Some days
I wonder 
if this is what it means to create 

— 


to stand in the middle of the whirlwind,
catching pieces of ourselves and
 holding them together with new meaning.  

Memory,
a dance between places
Every frame a mutation
Nothing staying still 

Nomadic and time traveling 
An incantation, a conjuring 
A teleportation
g h o s t s        c r o s s i n g s 

Nasheeka carries a huge bag out into the desert. 

Let’s try to catch the light
Be present 
As present as possible 

Rambi whispers because 

the memory is held in us, in the being, in the body and THAT is the archive 

It’s about motion, Melody muses 

IT’S A LIBERATORY THING – TO MOVE! 

and nothing can hold back the kind of transcendence, which occurs when you are moving 
when you’re moving in unison 
when you are dancing together 
when you are moving together. 

An expansive space where anything can happen 

You hear it, don’t you? That’s the sound of liberation. 

It doesn’t stop. 
There’s a sound to refusal. 
There’s a sound to joy. 
There’s a sound to expansion. 
There’s a sound, 
and we’ve always been listening. 

Since 2019 Rambisayi Marufu, Nasheeka Nedsreal and Melody Howse have been in some form of connection and proximity to each other, very often unknowingly. Now living in London and between Berlin and other parts of the world, they once all inhabited the same city, and at times unbeknownst, the same spaces. As Black diaspora scholars, artists, practitioners of healing and the body hailing from Zimbabwe, the USA and the UK, their practices were always likely to lead them to cross paths. This finally happened when they were brought together by Melody in the spring of 2024 to participate in an online conversation and collective sharing of their artistic works on AllegraLab platform. This convergence became the grounds for instigating a rethinking of the conditions of Black life, whilst exploring different approaches to practice, process and storytelling – and how these relate to a Black femme praxis of refusal, joy and expansion. Throughout the discussion they engaged in different modes of attendance and listening that invited the conversation to continue. To break with form is an essential aspect of their praxis. Therefore, this article not only furthers this original discussion but also resists following a conventional narrative arc. Instead, it offers an amalgam of exchanges, thoughts and engagements by Rambisayi, Nasheeka and Melody that incorporate some of their original visual, filmic and sonic contributions. Collectively, they expand how we might consider the creative practices of Black visual and sonic intonation– dual notions that provide a shared framing.   

Collage as Black Femme praxis 

Nasheeka’s poem above provides an entry point for contemplating this bridge between artistic practice and theory, as well as what it means to develop a Black visual and sonic language outside of western paradigms. This endeavour leads us somewhere other and unexpected in our capacity to tell stories that convey not just narratives, but feelings, emotions and a nonlinear sensorial temporality such as those that make up part of this text. Here we also engage collage as part of this praxis in service of Black femme ways of knowing and being in the world. Collaging in its manifold formations is a recurrence in our works. Like poetry, it leaves room for multiple interpretations as exemplified in Rambisayi’s sonic piece Intimate Geographies, an evocative soundscape that is told through an intimate engagement with the sonic worlds of our familial, social and personal relationships. Similarly, her visual work The Body in Protest is a collage of archival and found footage “depicting how the body is mobilized in times of political protest and the work that it does through physical actions like Toyi-Toyi’ng” (Marufu 2019) – a dance from Southern Africa that embodies anti-colonial resistance. This dance in unison under the cohesion of a vocal chant creates a powerful and resonant encounter that taps into the register of emotion.   

Nasheeka’s visual works Artefact Dream and Steady Rendering attend to this practice of reconfiguration differently. In the film Artefact Dream below – Nasheeka conjures the dream world, positioning the realm of the imaginary and the subconscious as formative plains that have an influence on perception and the constitution of knowledge. Through the layering of images that repeat, and the recurrent elements of the sound score we come to understand our multiplicity and the richness of ancestral connections that can be drawn on in different contexts and situations. Time here is redefined as is the temporal conscious. It is the ability to travel through images that become portals – portals that pull us into alternate places or sweep us along the paths of memory. 

Interlude with Nasheeka & Rambisayi 

Nasheeka: 

There’s something intuitive about my practice; a lot of the understanding, for me, comes afterward, in the process that follows. Artefact Dream is nomadic, and within it, there’s a sense of time travel. It’s also an incantation, a conjuring of the spirits. I see similarity in Intimate Geographies, and (in)dependence, in the sense of the multiplicity of who we are. It extends beyond us, into the community, and into the women who came before us. There are so many layers: in one frame, there are so many images and videos being juxtaposed. But Artefact Dream was my attempt to create a place of intimacy, something vulnerable, deeply personal to me, yet also sometimes very foreign as well. That’s how I feel in the dream space. My dreams feel like collages. It gave me this feeling of creating new narratives and Artefact came from this idea of trying to find pieces of memory, of the past or imagination, to hold on to, to identify with, to teleport and time travel with. To feel the feeling of, ‘Okay, I’m doing this by myself. I’m out here trying to figure out this journey of life’. But I’m not alone. There is this multiplicity inside; these little artifacts, these small, very important, tangible or intangible things that will carry me through this space, this dream space. ​ ​ 

Rambisayi: 

I was also thinking about all the different landscapes. It made me think about crossings, the various crossings and the conditions in which we’ve had to, or been forced to, make these journeys over the ocean, the desert, and other spaces where many lives are being lost every day. So now, in the sand, just as much as in the water, there are people, spirits there. But also in the desert, there are people who remain, who do not make it to the other side. And just how the sand is now mixed in with all of that as well – holding that memory, just as the water also holds the memory of these crossings. Memory being held in those spaces connected to the crossings. There was something ghostly, for lack of a better word, connected to the spirits, connected with the crossings and everything that happens in those spaces.  

Nasheeka: 

Rambi, yes. Meditating on memory, spirits and ghosts –this ghostliness –is part of the research I’m doing. What happens when you don’t see the face, or the head changes form? The human body becomes something else, which links to horror. It’s a kind of decapitation –and for me, a space of transformation and invocation, a channelling that reveals itself over time. 

Rambisayi: 

I think at the time that you are doing something, sometimes you’re not thinking about it. I’m just going on instinct in that moment – feeling into the work, trying to listen to what it’s saying, what you know, what you think it wants you to do, and how it needs to be expressed. For The Body in Protest, it was obviously a very emotional time, because I was making the work in real time as a coup was happening.  I was seeing everything unfold at home, while I was here in London, I was also in conversation with friends. Us gathering together and deciding to record our interactions: the space, the sound – and then just sitting with all of these things. Going back to the idea of archives: the archive exists in us, in all of this material around, and we’re constantly remaking it, as well as reinterpreting it. So, I think it’s really about trying to make sense of what’s happening, our feelings, our experiences – and just reaching for the tools and the resources that are already there.  

Sensorial Temporal  

Using the available tools at hand to make sense of our world is a tenet of our Black femme praxis. There is also something profound about working with sounds and images that conjure the idea of home –hearing the voices of those loved and lost. It is the rendering of a fragmented narrative that mines the archive of emotion, thought, and personal history to bring forth feelings of joy, melancholy, rage and wonder. Our challenge, though, is how to feel through stories that span time and place so that they reflect where we are in the present, and how we imagine ourselves in the future.  

Time is recursive, for example, in Melody’s experimental film (in)dependence, it spins in multiple directions at once – collapsing, bringing the dead to life, and pulling the past into the present. These are intimate resurrections: mothers and grandmothers, ancestors and matriarchal guides who remind us that we exist in relation to each other, that our blood holds their stories as much as our own. Jostling narratives, told through snippets of archive, unfold simultaneously: the independence of a nation, of a woman, of a people – each journey creating its own rhythm. Sound is integral to the narratives we are generating. It is harnessed to evoke smells, community, family, and place; to rethink our relationship to history, showing how temporal perception is a sensory encounter. Arrhythmic counter scores of drums and claps create a haptic soundscape that touches you through its vibrations, inviting you into the story. It is a practice that produces an embodied effect on the artist and on those who recognize its frequency. It is a commitment to infidelity as praxis, demonstrating collage as a Black diaspora visual and sonic practice. Through the loop, the replay, the rewind, and the multiplicity of being, this practice reflects our experiences as Black women* and how we reimagine our relationships to ancestors, time and space. It is a practice informed by Arthur Jafa’s notions of juxtaposition (2013), Tina Campt’s theory of adjacency (2019) and a Black feminist practice of collage that embodies these attendant forms. 

(In)dependence (2024) – Melody Howse, (https://vimeo.com/909020896) 

Continuum  

Collage is not only a form of practice, and a mode of engagement, but also a Black visual and sonic grammar that allows for adaptation, innovation. It revels in multiplicity as a future orientated methodology that looks both ways – to the past and the future – bringing seemingly unrelated sonorities, times, places and people together. This can be powerful work. Such aural and visual tapestries can be transportive, they hold in their mnemonics and semiotics signals, signs and an archive of knowledge that is reactivated through the auditory and embodied encounter. Sarah Jane Cervenak describes collage among other methodologies and modes of production as modalities in which “Black women [..] interact in the world without regulation” (2021, 15). There is a constant call for us, as Black women, to regulate ourselves within mainstream society, to self-censor, to fit inside the lines, and follow the rules, even within the realms of creative practice. And so, this idea of dysregulation is something we are collectively working with –as a sensation, a feeling or pull that manifests in the syncopation of a rhythm, in the pace of the films, and in the length of the images. Their juxtaposition with one another reveals a history buried in the interstitial space. These at times jarring sounds and images “identify how social forces like racism, patriarchy, neoliberalism, colonialism, and punishment, for example, are mapped onto landscapes and people” (Shabazz 2015, 4). The unruliness of Black life, that which cannot be contained, the fugitive and the enunciative are expressed and aestheticized through the “effective labour” (Campt 2019, 41) of this mode of assembly. These modalities, which can convey feeling while re-membering the past, are essential for all disciplines beyond anthropology – but it is in those disciplines that engage the social, the human and the creative where they are required most of all.  

And now,  

our thoughts take flight 
giving up shape
taking new form 

Everything in a state of becoming. 

I remember, 

Melody, your grandmother was laughing at the end 

so much joy
so much physical joy  

And I think about that conversation 

being able              in that time              to be together 

to celebrate 
whatever it is to celebrate 

creating spaces  
spaces of joy  
spaces of refusal 
spaces of expansion 

References

​​​Campt, Tina. 2019. ‘The Visual Frequency of Black Life: Love, Labor, and the Practice of Refusal’. Social Text 37 (3): 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-758503. 

Cervenak, Sarah Jane. 2021. Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life. Black Outdoors Innovations in the Poetics of Study. Durham London: Duke University Press. 

Jafa, Arthur, dir. 2013. Apex.  

Marufu, Rambisayi. 2019. Portfolio. THE BODY IN PROTEST (blog). 2019.  

Shabazz, Rashad. 2015. Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. The New Black Studies Series. Urbana Chicago Springfield: University of Illinois Press. 

Abstract: What does a Black visual and sonic practice look and sound like? What creative practice centres Black diasporic and Black femme epistemologies? These are some of the questions that Rambisayi Marufu, Nasheeka Nedsreal and Melody Howse attend to through their own artistic practice and in relation to each other. What emerges is a conversation that has taken place over a year on form, fidelity, collaboration and poetry, as well as registers and modalities that we see reflected through the method of collage. A method and practice that has continued to hold importance and once again prominence within the Black diaspora in the development of a Black visual and sonic grammar. Through this, we are able to tell different kinds of stories that foreground emotion, sensation and feeling, rather than adhering to the binary constraints of temporal linearity and progress narratives that marginalize Black diasporic ways of knowing. As such this piece offers a break in form and an intervention in thinking otherwise.