Being biracial is like being stuck in two seperate worlds, and the two worlds can never meet. This video describes this separation between both worlds, with the audio also representing that seperation between "being white" or "being black". The audio is from Kanye West's first album, "The College Dropout" which was released in 2004. I listened to to this album constantly as a kid, and it was the album that taught me how to 'be black'. I switch this audio between putting photographs and posters up on both sides, one representing the white side, showing happier photos of me with only white people, and my black side, showing the poster of my sisters dissapearence, and photos of me in braids looking sad. In the middle I have my geneology, showing that I am 42% African, but its also showing that I am 36% English. I wanted to keep my audience in a confined space, to make them uncomfortable, but also to have them close enough to touch each other, to feel truly connected. I wanted to get across that no matter what your geneology, we're all human, we're all connected. We don't have to be seperated by the color of our skin, because in the end we're not all 100% any race.
Sexual assault is something very common in every girls vocabulary. I can name over a handful of girls, including myself, that have been sexual assaulted or harrassed. We constantly are living in a state of fear, trying to 'prevent' from being assaulted, by holding a blade in our hands while walking home at night, to not going to that party we really wanted to go to. But what if we did go to that party? Well, someone might slip something in our drink. Someone might hurt us, no matter what we look like. Someone might taint our lives forever. I represent this scarring by the popping of a water balloon, filled with black water. The balloon represents a hymen being popped, and the water represents the lasting effect of the assault. It poors down on the boobs, leaving them ruined, some of them falling down in the process. The whole time the music keeps playing, life is still going on, no one noticing whats happening. The audiance is close together and very close to the action, the water dripping very close to their feet. It is a reminder that things like this happen every day, to people we know, and people choose to ignore it.
Family is complicated. Everyone knows that, but no one seems to talk about it. I wanted to show another side of family, the more complicated, nuiance side. To show the ups and downs, and all from the 'black sheep' of the family. The footage starts at my families home base, my grandparents house. They have had the same house for 38 years, and it the central point of all family gatherings. It was important to have it both in the beginning and end of the video, although this is a condensed version. Most of the footage is in Washington, D.C. where my cousins live. It was interesting combining footage from a place so familiar to a place I have only been to a few times. But family is like that, it is a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, especially as dynamics in the family change overtime. This video showed this dynamic, which is constantly shifting as my grandparents get older, and as the three children of the family, myself and my two cousins, grow into adulthood.
For this sound piece, the majority of the sounds come from everyday objects that where around my apartment. I warped them and played them backwards, fascinated by the way sound can change so much by just simply playing it backwards. I was inspired by the height of the end of the school year, the flurry of anxiety, the final crescendo of the school year. The sounds play, overlapping each other, getting faster and faster, until the reach a final tipping point. I wanted to make a sort of calm moment in the piece, to give the listener a sense of calmality, and then break that calm in the last moment. I was heavily influenced by the stress of the end of the year, but also the stress I feel every day. To be a good person, a good student, a good girlfriend. It seems that there is so much one has to be these days, and its very hard not to lose yourself, sort of in the way the sounds lose their original identities in the warping of them in this piece.