DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability
DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability is a visual conceptualization of what the DISPLACED Project's forthcoming exhibition may entail. Created by Shana M. griffin during her visual arts residency at the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans in the Fall of 2020, and presented as part of SOLOS: Exhibitions and New Work Showcases from January 9 to April 25, 2021, DISPLACING Blackness engages the spatial and geographic complexities of Black life impacted by violent housing and land-use policies rooted in racial slavery, conquest, and land thief.
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The Concept
Using archival research, historical images, maps, ephemera, found objects, original artwork, personal narratives, and stories of resistance, DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability chronicles the slave trade and slavery’s afterlife through the institutionalization of racial and gender violence in spatial segregation and discriminatory policies designed to make Black people disappear.
From abstract work depicting the violent screams of bondage and dispossession to the re-creation of a federal housing office where policymakers made discriminatory housing decisions to reimagined maps illustrating the violent formation of the city to personal narratives and moments of refusal, highlighting the organizing efforts of Black women living in public housing, DISPLACING Blackness examines the multiple ways displacement takes place and shapes Black life and becomes sites of everyday violence, subjectivity, resistance, and possibilities.
Themes Explored
Violent Articulations
Cartographies and Sites of Violence
The Selling
Policies of Exclusion
The Formation and Dismantling of Public Housing
Theirs Was A Movement Without Marches
Displacement by Evictions
Erased and Replaced
"We Had No Choice."
Erasure | Witness
Displacement: A Definition in 10 Words
Book Art
Source Material Installed
Gallery View
The documentation of DISPLACING Blackness was made possible by the Louisiana Cultural Equity Arts Grant of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.