Details
There Were 12 of Us. is a live-coded sonic-performance on Black grief and temporalities. Using select works from the Lithuanian Sinemateka archive, okcandice explores Black somatics when faced with normative conventions of Western (European) temporal constructs; including isolation, ostracisation and racism — moments of crisis that shift the body’s response to linear time.
okcandice proposes that sound can help us examine Black time geographies and in turn allow Black people to functionally and socially exist in a new time/space of their own making.
The title refers to the okcandice’s month-long residency at Rupert in Vilnius, LT where they notably counted 12 Black people during their stay. The work also references (and samples) Laura Stasiulytė’s video work "Counting Braids" (2002) wherein the Lithianian artist can be seen counting the braids of an unnamed Senegalese artist she met during a residency in Vienna, Austria. She is the only non-white person to appear in the Sinemateka archive.