REMEMBRANCE AS RESISTANCE Digitally Mapping the Ring Shout
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED A site-specific projection mapping installation by
Visual Artist
CHARMAINE MINNIEFIELD &
The New Freedom Project Using art as a catalyst for change
REMEMBRANCE AS RESISTANCE Preserving Black Narratives
Overview
Visual artist and producer, Charmaine Minniefield, leverages technology to digitize historical memories and social context in her public art installation entitled, “Remembrance as Resistance: Digitally Mapping The Ring Shout” This site-specific installation examines the institution of place and space as they inform identity and belonging by revisiting the Ring Shout - a traditional African-American worship and gathering practice whose origins predate slavery out of West African ritual and ceremony. It is understood that enslaved individuals could not legally gather other than for worship. They also could not have their traditional drums. Consequently communities would create what would come to be known as the Praise House - a small usually wooden structure - a barn or shack used for worship. The wooden floors once stomped or shouted upon (physical full body rhythmic movement) became the communal drum. The circle was where the gathering would take place, sometimes as an act of resistance, and where prayers were harnessed. These sacred spaces still remain but are rare and endangered today. The project creates a digital Ring Shout, projected onto the exteriors of a preferably historic space/ structure (i.e., a church) who’s surroundings have changed due to the effects of gentrification and redevelopment and who’s history and importance has been diminished as a result. The idea is to create a “sanctuary” of remembrance. The work provides an experiential activation of space, reminiscent of the collective hope of ancestors gone before while recapturing both black narratives and prayers forgotten or lost to the effects of erasure. This installation makes connections between the endangered Gullah Geechee coastal area, where signs of the Ring Shout remain today, to places like the King Historic District, also affected by changing development and gentrification, both rich with history of African-American faith-led resistance and activism. The Atlanta district is home to Ebenezer Baptist Church, once pastured by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a number of historic black churches, many founded over 150 years ago during reconstruction upon emancipation. This project uses video mapping to explore remembrance as resistance against erasure, gentrification and displacement as a part of Minniefield’s ongoing community-based programming, The New Freedom Project, which uses art to explore contemporary social justice issues in communities in hopes to affect positive change. Remembrance as Resistance: Digitally Mapping the Ring Shout was recently mounted during ROOTS Weekend Atlanta, a 3-day regional convening of artist activists, presented by Alternate ROOTS in the King Historic District. This proposal seeks presenting opportunities in similar situations - communities, cities and spaces affected by gentrification and shifting social landscapes with special interest in faith-based initiatives and conversations around faith and social justice.
THE NEW FREEDOM PROJECT
CHARMAINE MINNIEFIELD Visual Artist
A Projection Mapping Sitespecific Installation Proposal
Charmaine Minniefield draws from indigenous traditions as seen throughout Africa and the Diaspora and her personal connection to women who have played a major role in her life. Her work explores African and African American ritual from a feminist perspective by pulling the past to the present, conversing between spirit space and the physical. Her iconic scale portraits of women, often painted in bold colors and patterns and their placement are intended as spirit guides. These "shrine paintings" celebrate her ancestors and the strength and mysterious power of women. With a degree in Fine Art from Agnes Scott
College, Charmaine Minniefield has also served the Atlanta area as an arts administrator for nearly 20 years, holding positions with such arts organizations as the National Black Arts Festival, the High Museum of Art and the Fulton County Department of Art and Culture, producing projects with such organizations as Alternate ROOTS, Points of Light and Flux Projects. She currently serves as faculty for the Art and Visual Culture Department of Spelman College. Charmaine Minniefield is featured as an Atlanta change-maker by Mercedes Benz as a part of their recent Greatness Lives Here campaign.
COLLABORATORS Creative Team
Julie B. Johnson, PhD, -Choreographer
Julie B. Johnson is a Dance Lecturer at Spelman College; a co-founding editor of The Dancer-Citizen; and a strategist for Lela Aisha Jones | FlyGround and Dancing for Justice Philadelphia. Her work centers on African Diaspora movement aesthetics, community meaning, collaborative inquiry, and embodied memory.
MOVEMENT Kimbery Binns - Digital Editor
Kimberly Binns is a filmmaker, editor, visual artist and curator. Her signature “micro-mentaries” are short documentaries which tell the stories of creatives, makers and artists. She has served as a contributor to Atlanta’s online arts magazine, Burnaway by capturing the Atlanta cultural scene on film. Her recent work documented the ChopArts international program for homeless youth in India. See her “micro-mentory” work at https://vimeo.com/ kimbinns
IMAGE Muthi Reed - Sound Score
Serena Muthi Reed is an ethnographic artist working in sound, visual media, and design. Frequent life patterns of geographic & social migration are premiere creative avenues for shaping community and kinfolk connections. Reed archives + programs + remixes sound, photo, video, and internet content to “talk back” to mainstream media’s rendering of Black life. Reed resources the tools of vernacular, spiritual practice, and cultural work to generate content reflecting everyday life and love for working class folks, queers, and freedom fighters.
SOUND
DREAMING IN SYMPHONY SOUND SCORE - Collaboration
click to see - Muthi Reed - CV
Project Potential
CREATIVE THOUGHT - LEADING TO A LIVE PERFORMANCE Sound artist, Muthi Reed, dreams in symphony. They have been conjuring with an ancestral jazz composer named Lawrence Butch Morris by studying and adapting a method he coined called ConductionÂŽ Considering Blackness. Defining it as a shifting forming shape of our lives, real and imagined - Blackness is the magic bag in which Muthi makes, collects, archives, and remixes sound. Blackness is the center of this conjuring, time space traveling, meditation, and shape shifting. In studying it and looking at Blackness as a shape, their work tries to get at its essence and its contradictions, by speculating how it is so feared and yet so revered; how timeless and ancient the attitude of Blackness is (James Brown). This musical score as a work will push at doing everything Blacker than ever. Dreaming in symphony will be an All Black Everything. Supporting Blackness as an indefinite, infinite, tangible, intangible thing continuing its shape forever-complex, rich, anti oppressive, underground, rooted, unable to be contained, unable to fit singular definitions, inexhaustible, uprising of the people. This work will be a portal designed to keep reimagining the end of war, world building new cosmographies, and shape shifting ourselves for the love, presence, and excellence Blackness has always demanded. THE DREAMING - AN ARTIST RESIDENCY As a central component of this project the sound score offers a distinct opportunity for creative collaboration. With the interest in spatial design and public installation as a formation of symphony, Muthi Reed will collaborate with your symphony orchestra to engage sensory technology and to create an architectural shape/container for the Ring Shout. Muthi will develop a work from sketch, to design, composing, conducting and programming the final installation and performance. After this creative residency, Muthi will perform live both as the sound mixer (dj) and conductor of the orchestra within the visual installation. Ideal artistic residency (6 months to 1-year) To inquire contact: muthireed@protonmail.com
Dance Community-based Workshop
Dance artist Julie B. Johnson engages audiences and dance participants an interactive, embodied exploration of space, identity, and erasure through Moving Our Stories. This communal movement experience contributes to “Remembrance as Resistance: Digitally Mapping the Ring Shout” by gathering, documenting, archiving, and exchanging personal and cultural narratives of displacement, marginalization, and resilience.
Project Potential
MOVING OUR STORIES
Moving Our Stories serves as a bridge to understanding the landscape of knowledge and meaning that our bodies hold and create. It is a multifaceted creative practice that explores embodied memory and personal narratives through dance workshops, choreographic practice, creative and scholarly research, and community dialogues. Drawing on a deep history of storytelling and creative movement practices in the field of dance and beyond Moving Our Stories investigates the ways our histories live and move in our bodies. Together, we move our stories to find new connections between ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Moving Our Stories is based on four key premises: 1.
Our personal histories live and move in our bodies;
2.
Through dancing, observing, writing, and discussing, we can draw on sense perception (what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and how we move) to locate and access embodied memory;
3.
By mapping, moving, and sharing our stories, we can more deeply understand ourselves, each other, and the ways in which we operate in the world;
4.
This understanding creates empathic connections that can affect personal and social change - starting at the level of the body.
To inquire contact: Julie@JulieBJohnson
Moving Our Stories embraces storytelling as a radical act, a social justice practice. Sharing, documenting, and archiving personal and collective narratives is vital for communities whose histories have been (and continue to be) marginalized, skewed, erased. Dance — a way of being in, thinking about, and creating change in the world — allows us to claim agency over our stories, starting with our own bodies. Drawing parallels to the Ring Shout and Gullah-Geechee communities, the core question, “what does it mean to erase/to be erased?” provides a guiding prompt for movement exploration taking place through public workshops open to all audiences and choreographic process in collaboration with Atlanta-area dance artists. Stories of ‘erasure’ — whether an act of eradication or remnants of the past that mark our survival — illuminate what lingers in the face of displacement or destruction, and how collective memory can serve as a practice of survival and empowerment.
DIGITAL RING SHOUT Local
Budget
Artistic Fees……………………………………………………..…….…$6,500 • Lead Artist - Charmaine Minniefield $2500 (includes talk) • Collaborators - $1000 x 3 = $3000 • Dancers $300 x 3 - $900 • Student Assistant $100 Honorarium………………………………………………………………..$500 • Speakers $100 x 5 Equipment & Production………………………………………………$3,000 Total…………………………………………..…………………………$10,000
Timeline
2018 April - Alumnae Weekend
Potential Presenting Partners
Agnes Scott College Columbia Seminary Emory University
For booking considerations for this project, the artist requires a 10% deposit to secure the date(s). With an ideal payment schedule to be determined by a separate agreement between the presenter and the artist.
Process
The budget as stated here does not represent additional artistic fees associated with other before mentioned “potential” project components Moving our Stories workshop and/or the sound score collaboration. The fees for these additional components are based on the details of the collaboration and are available upon request.
Charmaine Minniefield 1130 Longshore Drive
Contact
Decatur, GA 30032 404-202-2271 CharmaineMinniefield@gmail.com www.CharmaineMinniefield.com www.TheNewFreedomProject.com
ART IN PUBLIC SPACES Remembering the past and influencing the present Work Samples Recent work Murals in Schools Program Hollis Innovation Academy in Vine City - Atlanta Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School - Atlanta SL Horton Elementary Atlanta
“Watch Me Learn” (above 25’x50’, Edgewood & Jackson St. OFW)commissioned by the Not A Crime international campaign against modern day apartheid. This work was designed in collaboration with civil rights icon, Dr. Doris Derby, who’s image comes from her work in Mound Bayou, MS. Minniefield, chose to celebrate the rich civil rights history of the King Historic District in which this mural resides as a push-back against the erasure of this history due to pending development and gentrification in the area.
“A Patch of Pretty” (lower right , 15’x100’, Ralph David Abernathy and Whitehall, West End) - in the West End, this work was commissioned by the West End business district in order to beautify a dilapidated building at a high traffic intersection. With bold colors and patterns, the work
celebrates the diversity of the district by displaying patches of African fabrics. Again, creating a visual gesture to the culture and history of this community, this mural distinctly brands a changing community giving reverence to the historical past.
Black Girl Cameo Original image, charcoal on paper, digitized mixed media on archival paper. 2016
Work Samples
Black Angel: Tribute to Spelman College founders, 2016. Image projected Giles Hall, the 135 year old original building of Spelman.
Woman in Stripes New Freedom Series Acrylic on paper. 30� x 24�, 2015
Work Samples
Jump Rope Initiation, image from Penn Center Archives, 1862. Original acrylic on canvas, digitized mixed media, 2017.
DIGITAL RING SHOUT Media Footage from recent installation • Digitally Mapping The Ring Shout: https://vimeo.com/244960606
Highlighting the Collaborators Sound Score and the work of Muthi Reed • Digital Ring Shout, by Muthi Reed: Rockers on Dropbox • Muthi Reed on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/krewecoumbite
Dance, more about Julie B. Johnson • Julie B. Johnson, http://www.juliebjohnson.com/
Digital work by Kimberly Binns • https://vimeo.com/kimbinns
Resources AfroPop Worldwide: The Ring and the Shout (listen to the Ring Shout!) • https://soundcloud.com/afropop-worldwide/the-ring-and-the-shout-2
Macintosh Ring Shouters • http://mcintoshcountyshouters.com/
Geechee Kunda Heritage Center • http://www.geecheekunda.com/
Preserving Black Narratives The New Freedom Project Using art as a catalyst for change
Charmaine Minniefield 1130 Longshore Drive Decatur, GA 30032 404-202-2271 CharmaineMinniefield@gmail.com www.CharmaineMinniefield.com www.TheNewFreedomProject.com