ariella tai

safehouse ii uses video, sound and text to consider blackness, social (dis)order, refusal and the compulsions to labor as they exist in relationship to care work.  Using Saidiya Hartman’s transformative work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments to think through the absence of black stories, particularly the stories of black women and queer people, from the archive, this video seeks to speculate on a small alternate world in a system of institutionalized care built on carceral logics.  How do we conceive the daily work that goes into healing epigenetic and systemically reified trauma? How do we build alternate systems, habitats and ways of being from deep inside the belly of the beast?  

safehouse ii was commissioned by Sajdeep Soomal for the group exhibition Architectures After the Asylum, curated by Soomal and shown at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, Canada Jan-Feb 2020.

Runtime: 12 minutes

Starring: April Nyquist and David (Debris) Grandfield 

Director of Photography: Sika Stanton

Gaffer, Grip, Lighting: Andre Jones

Production Assistant: Kanda Mbenza-Ngoma

Directed, Produced and Edited by: ariella tai

Color: Sika Stanton

Excerpts from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman performed by:  jayy dodd