Torkwase Dyson

Drawing on her theory of “black compositional thought,” Torkwase Dyson’s two-act performance and sculptural installation I Can Drink the Distance creates a platform through which contemporary artists, writers, and musicians can consider black spatial and ecological relations in our current times. For Dyson, one of the most pressing issues today is human-induced climate change, a defining phenomenon of the Anthropocene. For this project Dyson considers the Anthropocene's relationship to racism, plantation slavery, and the white supremacy that informed much of industrialization—a matrix of relations referred to as the Plantationocene. Staged over two evenings, Dyson’s highly spatial practice becomes a means through which to navigate shared environmental precarities; hauntology; architecture; unfixed geographies composed by black bodies; and properties of movement, narrative, scale and sound that can provide networks of liberation.