I Promise to Burn Forever

In her interactive games, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley intervenes in the course of history for those who are ready. Through digitally transmitted wisdom of Black trans ancestors who were buried too soon, she creates avenues to heal these severed relationships and restores agency in how they are remembered. She begins this process that is reanimated by each visitor, creating a game world for resurrection, rest, joy, and self inquiry, where the player is accountable to their participation within and beyond the gallery.

Agartuu Inor’s installation summons an afro-indigenous landscape through the algorithmically generated Barakah Garden. Sculptural references from East-African Islamic architecture form the Barakah Library, a memorial archive filled with Black and Indigenous texts for liberation and healing. The library’s interface asks the next lender to contact its previous borrower for access, creating a web of decentralized study that is facilitated by each book’s digital footprint. The archive becomes not only the books, but also the connections they make.

These emerging archives overlap with the “anarchival,” described by artist and scholar Carine Zaayman as those practices that seek the “full sensorial experience of lived life – its non-linear temporality, unrealized potentials, and immaterial networks of intersubjectivity.” The anarchival method uncovers moments of trust where the unexpected allows us to stray together from the path of common knowledge, locating what was marked to be forgotten, and what must have been lived, because you are living in its lineage now. 

To these archivists, your life is precious, your confusion is instructive, and your anger is a sacred burning beacon. They know what it is like to call out for your ancestors while surrounded by proof of their absence. They know of captive tongues, held because the words weren’t there, or a deal had been made with fear. They know so intimately of the centuries long silences that have rotted holes in our visions of a collective. And they know of our hearts longing for each other, ready to love entire worlds into existence. 

They ask, how will you see yourself in this story? 

Open Gallery Hours through October 11
Thursday: 1pm - 5pm
Fridays: 1pm - 5pm
Saturdays: 2pm - 6pm