deathwalk (2020)
two channel, digital, 12.04 mins
deathwalk is a dual-channel experimental piece that draws from process-oriented psychological frameworks of primary and secondary processes, alongside taoism, to explore the intersections of origin stories and trauma, as unconscious catalysts into rites of initiation and pathways to developmental shapeshifting practices, within a western-materialist-secular contemporary context. emeke utilises non-linear autobiographical fragments as a container to consider questions of teleology, ontology, epistemology and axiology, with a particular focus on the implementation of motifs of birth and death.
“dubois is always using what spivak and chandler would describe as the autobiographical example, which is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them. In lose your mother, I wanted to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction.”
– fugitive dreams of diaspora, sadiya hartman
“my mother never left my father. for the children, she said. she wanted us to grow up whole. but whole is not the way children grow.”
– there is an anger that moves, kei miller
“i wish I had an enemy to avenge my mother and father. but which man has there been, that has ever killed air?”
– black leopard, red wolf, marlon james
“i am sure that was my mother I saw dancing…”
– the sleepers of roraima, wilson harris