Rhea Storr: The Black Aesthetic as an Agent of Community

Artist filmmaker Rhea Storr leads an online session exploring themes of her 2020 essay ‘The Black Aesthetic as an Agent of Community: Radical Organising in the UK and USA,’ Non-Fiction journal, 2020. During the meeting we will read out loud together from Rhea’s essay, and view and discuss her film, ‘A Protest, ‘A Celebration, A Mixed Message,’ (2018).

Reading and screenings will open up discussions on questions including:

• Do any of these ideas around the Black Aesthetic translate to other groups which might be misrepresented or less visible? (Can for instance themes of community, circulation and archive speak to feminism in the same way as Black Aesthetics)?

• What effects do the objects (the accumulation of records or media or costume for instance) have on the films overall?

• Who is on the inside and who is on the outside of the communities being created? Who is the film made for and what is hidden from us? 

• How might aesthetics predicated on a specific group of people circulate? 

EventBrite Registration

Registration will close one hour before the event (18.00 hrs December 9th, 2021)

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rhea-storr-the-black-aesthetic-as-an-agent-of-community-tickets-204469893957

 Rhea Storr
Rhea Storr is an artist filmmaker who explores the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures. Masquerade as a site of protest or subversion is an ongoing theme in her work. So, too, is the effect of place or space on cultural representation. Rhea Storr often works in 16mm film; she considers that analogue film might be useful to Black artists, both in the aesthetics it creates and the production models it facilitates. She is currently undertaking a PhD entitled 'Towards a Black British Aesthetic: How is Black Radical Imagination realised through 16mm filmmaking practices?' She is a co-director of not nowhere an artists’ film co-operative, London, that has a particular focus on analogue film. She is resident at Somerset House, London and programmes at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. She is the winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2020 and the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize. She was educated at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art.

Further Readings

Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Beacon Press: Boston, 2003

E. Jane, Nope (a manifesto), http://www.e-jane.net/ 

Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Verso: Brooklyn, 2020

Martine Syms, The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, rhizome.org, 2013 http://thirdrailquarterly.org/martine-syms-the-mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/

Feminist Duration
This workshop is part of the Feminist Duration series which explores under-known texts, ideas, and movements associated with earlier periods of feminist activity in the UK. Originally designed as part of a year-long residency at the South London Gallery, and rescheduled online in the wake of the COVID pandemic, the programme juxtaposes earlier moments of feminist with current urgencies and struggles.

By restoring material texture to overlooked political and cultural movements, it seeks to resist versions of the past that reduce feminist struggle to one-dimensional stereotypes. Looking to the past to activate its nascent potential, the programme aims to identify tools that can inspire and enrich further collective action, promoting the intergenerational exchange of knowledge and experience. While honouring earlier feminisms, the series also highlights how collaboration, difference, and dissent have characterised previous feminist movements, and how feminists have both negotiated, and failed to significantly attend to, differences between themselves.

Feminist Duration is generously supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.

 Image: Rhea Storr, ‘A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message,’ 2018