Collaboration with Sophia-Rose Diodati

Project Critics Mira Henry and Matthew Au (Current Interests)

Academic Work

MORE LIFE meditates on the always already premature death of queers of color. Through architecture and performance, the project processes us past the funeral and towards a utopic horizon where the dead and the still living dance together. Beginning with a party which leaves behind a dance floor carrying the memories of a party which is ended and dead, the architecture struggles to find and capture the “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things” from this party, this celebration in life, which persist as material ephemera. The project is a collaboration with Sophia Diodati.

/Project Thesis/ Via minoritarian performance, the funerary procession is an afterlife party which produces More Life by communally accompanying the dead.

/Introductory Quote on Queer Death/ A reading from the book of Joshua Chambers-Letson: “The desire to be left alone is not the same thing as the desire to be alone. And we need each other in order to keep each other alive… You can’t remember the names of everyone who died. None of your friends can. You have to ponder old photographs. You ask each other. Remember him? What was his name? You worry that in forgetting them (or parts of them), you might be killing them a second time over… memory is not any one person’s task: memory is something we build together. The reason for this is because memory is a burden... Keeping the dead alive. And we need More Life. Every brown queer death is premature. Such a posture might generate new insights into the enormous challenges brown queers face when building (many times from scratch) the resources and systems we need to learn and practice mutual care… death (is) not an abstraction but socially constituted and distributed unjustly. To remain alive, still, in the face of an annihilation can itself be a revolutionary act Worlds end all the time… even so and as yet, there is still life.” Joshua Chambers-Letson,After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

/Performance Incantation/ “We’re glad to see you. And happily surprised that so many of you. We really didn’t expect anybody tonight. And you know why. Everybody knows everything. Everything is everything. Everything is everything. And you know why but we’re glad that you’ve come to see us. And hope that we can provide some kind of Something for you this evening. This particular evening. This sunday evening at this particular time in 1968. We hope that we can give you Something. Something. Whatever it is that you need tonight.” Nina Simone, “Sunday in Savannah - Live at Westbury Music Fair, Westbury, NY - April 1968”

/Guest List/ Nina Simone, Sam Waymon, Tseng Kwong Chi, Keith Haring, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Jose Esteban Muñoz, Coco Fusco, Miss Coco, Charlotte Brathwaite, Thomas Ostermeier, Corona, Claire Denis, Denis Lavant, Tina Turner, Wendy Williams, Sasha Colby, Honey Gonzales Balenciaga, Childish Gambino, Grace Jones, Marsha P. Johnson, Bill T Jones, Dena Cass, Rihana, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Donna Summer, Danh V., Sylvester, Cakes Da Killa, Gelsey Bell, Alex Newell, DJ Saxon, Krista A. Thompson