kelechi agwuncha
tether
video installation view, Structural and Materials Engineering (SME) Theatre, UC San Diego live performed May 7, 2022.
contact: kelechi.a@outlook.com
The one-channel video installation tether is live performed in a theatre before an audience using techniques of expanded cinema ; specifically live scoring and video jockeying. The video was produced as a result of the first auto-biographical video piece I made two years ago, entitled synonyms of orange. The video piece reimagines my childhood experiences of playing tetherball, an elementary school recess game that was my first introduction to play. The video installation physicalizes my desires through a sculptural object - a tetherball draped in sequined fabric -and a video that transcend tetherball using Igbo Ojiọnu masquerade aesthetics and gestures of flight.
kelechi agwuncha (b.Chicago), is a Chicago & San Diego-based Igbo-American artist, concerned with troubling sports and their traditional gestures to create new relationships that often combine movement practices & histories rooted in West-African cultures or other subverted, playful forms. tether is a meditation on my subconscious childhood memories of performance that documents a new ritual to bridges my memories of playing tetherball and witnessing traditional Ojiọnu Igbo masquerade figures gesture in a kind of spectacular, uncensored reality at Igbo-American parrties. As a former athlete, I am interested in fabulating my youthful memories of performance and embodied history to sports so as to :
unfold a narrative ; embellish (muscle & blood) memory ; make a point of anchorage ; allow a delay to become a perspective of formation ; create new categories of play that make for more slippages between sports ; create elastic moments that question sports as an apparatus ; develop a narrative of emergence ; redefine sports that seek to manage the way we’re conditioned to move ; push against hegemony ; absorb many spaces ; absorb light; retrain & reattach my body to play ; translate my life practice of play ; embody my memory ; implicate my body ; transform me into an unidentifiable fantasized body
kelechi agwuncha in collaboration with musician Eva Marie Gonzalez Ruskiewicz, tether , 2022. One channel video installation, HD video transferred to VHS, 15 minutes, 47 seconds, projected onto translucent sheets. Photographed by Arlene Mejorado, and video documented by Hazel Katz
tether, sculptural object, mixed media including fabric, metal, tire ; affixed by alexis hithe
tether cinematography: Jun ! & kelechi agwuncha
tether, (four) video gif stills, 2022, HD video
tetherball was the game where i could fly.
here begins my first memory of play
& it’s associated elements that each embody my relation:
a rope
a tethered ball
a galvanized metal pole
a white painted circumference line
a player & i
a feedback loop
a player & i
a thrust above
a back & forth launch from the ground
a back & forth landing upon the ground
a continual flight
a hand swats away
a ball spirals
a rope winds
a gradual return to Earth
a return to body
a ritual
my mind concentrates on a win.
my body prepares to leave again.
a game so abstract, so minimal
so simple it was to fly.
i am lured by this feeling.
i could play forever.