Something is Trying to Disappear Me

Something is Trying to Disappear Me – James Jordan Johnson

Largely Developed through Kevin Quashie’s writing The Black Quiet, Something is Trying to Disappear Me is a durational performance concerned with thinking about a way to make known a method of Black interiority, or in other words a sense of self-determined stillness, within a performance based context and how slowness as a modality can be politically viewed within Blackess. It is from this viewpoint that Blackness and its social relationship to bodily display becomes the centre of Black physical aliveness and gesture. Taking this racialised wage and framework that demands Black performance to sustain an unwavering level of physical and athletic mastery, is rendered as a methodological void.

Something is Trying to Disappear Me at its explorative core, leads with its linguistic interest in the Jamaican word ‘yard’, which bears a contextual symbiosis. First within yard referring to soil and flora, to also meaning the living quarters of the home. Through the performance, I am thinking about the yard as an archive and how it is recalled and retold within its ability to possess a complex understanding of material culture. The carving out of a yard within the performance presents the worthwhile difficulty with imagination and experience and whether legibility can be untangled or partitioned from illegibility. The performance is a space where gestures are carved out and where some materials become decimated and reborn, taking on a new visual sensibility and life-cycle to reify the phantasmic wonders of the mind when in recollection of family, ancestry, returns, gatherings, soil fertilisation, ruination, wood formations and Black nautical histories.

Artist Bio
James Jordan Johnson is an artist-researcher (b.1997, London) based in Margate working within performance and sculpture. His practice is concerned with the relationship between Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Diasporic material culture and performative histories. Thinking about the role memory plays in the political matters of citizenship, legibility, land and myth-making. He tends to ground his work within site-specific or public spaces, using topographical mapping, material and object activation.