Kearra Amaya Gopee

an excision spell (2020) is an intra-communal call to arms and self-determination in the face of white supremacist violence.

Following more than three years of exploratory research, photography, and writing about the singular view from his Brooklyn studio, Groeneboer took up a daily practice over the subsequent two and a half years of filming the panorama through his window. This process entailed a durational commitment to witnessing the presence of architectures and systems that are often hidden from everyday life. The resulting film is a visual meditation that follows the cyclical rhythms of weather and industry to offer a portrait of New York City in relation to the forces that shape it, including late-stage capitalism and environmental crises. [Overview Courtesy of The Kitchen]

Kearra Amaya Gopee’s docu-fictional short Ca(r)milla considers the revisionist potential that lies within folkloric myth. For Gopee, myth is a storytelling mechanism teeming with possibility––it’s an oratory approach that invites us to reimagine our histories and rewrite our lineages in the face of coloniality. In Ca(r)milla, Gopee annotates the parable of the soucouyant, a blood-craving, vampiric figure typically rendered as an undesirable older woman in Trinidadian legends. https://thekitchen.org/on-screen/ca-r-milla/

A braided essay that asks participants about their relationships to concepts of revenge and justice. How can song conjure the sublime, necessary, and oft resisted work of deconstruction?