BLACK(ENED) (DIS)SATISFACTION

On Kearra Amaya Gopee’s installation “pappyshow in the dark time, my love”

by Kali Tambreé

New York–based antidisciplinary artist Kearra Amaya Gopee’s installation “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” (2022) asks, “What does the guttural give us that the saccharine cannot?” The installation consists of an audiovisual triptych surrounding an ouroboros carved into a viewing bench.. The figure and flames of an unrelenting Blue Devil a figure central to Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival celebrations emboldens the film. The Blue Devil’s demand is to stay with dissatisfaction. From an unsatisfiable posture, the Blue Devil reveals questions of “unpayable debt,” a theory pursued in depth by academic and practicing artist Denise Ferreira da Silva in her new work of the same name. To borrow again from da

BLACK(ENED) (DIS)SATISFACTION

Here, in the ruins of our shared darkness, I whisper to you, “are you satisfied?” Smoke rises, your face, always, already inflected with fire, tarries the line between “no” and “yes is an impossibility.”

Kearra: I love being incited to mangle. If I’m mangling anything, I want to mangle it with you.

“Let’s make a world of our dissatisfaction,” I respond.

Noticing “only against the backdrop of fire does your painted body bring out the blue of night.” I feel your emergency; I dance to it.

Kearra: When it all boils down, who can render the noise like the flesh?

It occurs to me, “I’ve never asked you, but what comes after the flesh?”

Walk with me to flesh’s edge; tell me, do you hear everything or nothing?

Silva, “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is an experiment in activating “blackness’s disruptive force, that is, its capacity to tear the veil of transparency (even if briefly) and disclose what lies at the limits of justice.”

[Emphasis added.]

The lens flits and resolves like a curious eye settling into a conversation that requires a vulnerable amount of attention. Kearra floats on the screen of a MacBook held by a friend. They are in conversation with three friends situated in their respective spaces: Richie sits on the couch, Ashlee rocks slowly in a hammock, and Elana is framed by a window, low gray clouds settling behind green mountains. Kearra’s presence instigates a series of pauses, lacunae accentuated by the murmuring of birds.

Elana: So we in J’ouvert / the Purge Purge J’ouvert … revenge is mine for the taking, nah boy. [Giggles.]

Kearra: That look like it elicit a type of glee in yuh.

Elana: [Laughs.]

Kearra: Expand on that feeling.

Expand on that feeling for meh.

Kearra asks (us all), “What would you do if you could have your revenge?” As what immediately takes shape in my mind, I wonder what creates more of a paradox: the question of could or the conundrum of your? The scope and scale of this question is its central epistemological burden.

Filmed in Trinidad and Tobago, and produced virtually between Trinidad and Tobago and Los Angeles, predominantly during the ongoing pandemic, “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” stages a conversation shaped by aloneness, longing, deprivation, and detachment. Slavery neither as metaphor nor as historical event establishes the stage and forges the (ill) conditions from which any conversation of black(ened) revenge will unfold.

The viewer witnesses Kearra and their loved ones entrapped in a call-and-response with the pressures of law, ethics, morality, and religious guilt, as they recall the fatal stakes of any black(ened) revenge. With capacity to claim neither injury nor redress comes the displacement of a black(ened) my, precluding the possession of political subjectivity. Possessing no legible measurement to claim the injury of anti-blackness thus precludes the legitimacy and materiality of our something-like revenge or otherwise. How can one make a claim for revenge in the face of a violence with no accountable analogy? Employing what grammar, stood on what ground may that claim find legibility? Their revenge fantasies are delivered amidst the murkiness of dissatisfaction, their satisfaction made impossible.

Unfolding less as dreams of freedom, revenge as explored in “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is indexed by a spectral and irreversible confrontation immolated by the implications of another burning, an indiscriminate fire. The process of mourning the unchanging climate of anti-blackness offers new shapes of desire. Abandoning the temporality of forgiveness, revenge bred from the ordinary ambience of antiblackness asks not of its repair toward a better future.

Can a slave make a plea for justice on a plantation? If justice is a service of/for humanity, is humanism available to the slave?

Can juridical metrics of injury and/or redress index and punish anti-blackness? The film offers me a new metric of black(ened) revenge, units taken in fire.

Kearra probes Elana: If the impetus is to “pick up something,” what does putting it down look like? And if we say putting it down, for instance, could be “justice,” what does that look like essentially?

[Kearra pauses as if arrested by the gravity of their own impossible question.] Elana without hesitation: Flames. Everywhere. Everything Kearra: Flames everywhere. Wha yuh burning? And be graphic.

With nowhere to go where the state would not eventually intervene, Kearra’s artistic ethos relies on a methodology of sprawl. Formalized art regimes often exchange expertise and discipline for an imposed singular sense of self, wherein multidisciplinarity might just be an entry point to multiple expertise (read: ownership). The complexity of “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is its antidisciplinarity. Its affective nuances are expressed through a community that is formed in atemporal, geographic plasticity, such that their communion takes whatever form is necessary to hold something-like satisfaction (however brief).

Kearra told me: I was beginning to yearn for a more nuanced understanding of affect in my own work, if only as a salve for my own detachment.

As honestly as the work resuscitates dissatisfaction (leaving it available for the taking and creating a public for its display), it also renders something-like a disarticulation of satisfaction’s attainability. The viewer’s experience of the installation is not designed to be accumulated, discovered, or understood, a satisfaction-seeking mode of engagement with art. The video footage is unstill but not unnatural, rhythmically mutable like an inhale and an exhale (reminding you to inhale and exhale). The images are at times synchronous, at other times split between glimpses of the speaker’s clutched palms, small objects in private corners, erupting smiles, crossed ankles, palm trees caught in the wind. The work finds you in the familiar intimacy of a gesture or the fastidious unraveling of a risky question.

Filling the room to its corners, the film projection makes a balanced gaze impossible. By not offering a single unit of focus, “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” displaces consumptive and extractive strategies of viewership. The film is edited in a way that betrays the traditional conventions of an interview, elongating and suturing along threads of intimacy rather than linearity and its conclusive end: revelation. Kearra’s editing favors sighs and fidgets over eye contact. They keep affective nuances that might escape a lens or editing process focused on capturing truth for an “official record.”

Making no formal claims regarding a colonial past nor a “post”-colonial now, the temporal landscape of the film is of multiple tenses. Rememory (recalling Sethe in Beloved) syncopates the subjunctive, as their conversation unravels from a simultaneous preoccupation with the violent events of their collective last week, as with an impending but atemporal doomsday. We are intimately involved in the familiar and intertwined worlds of Kearra and their loved ones (including those present but off-camera for production purposes). Their risk, then, is not ours to keep. The demand of the film’s intimacy is to meet at the site of our ruptured geographies, to let rememory in, and to ask, What shapes our revenge? The work reverberates a mandate to turn inward, not for the sake of self-identification, but from an understanding that you must prepare to be called to return to the communal, to share in the praxis of study, instigation, and skill-sharing.

Kearra: The more in touch with myself I feel, the more equipped I am to return to my people. Solitude and reprieve both emerge as possibilities in laying bare what we fear to desire.

Kearra: We engage each other with mutual wonder and terror.

Collectivity, collaboration, and risk are often-absented facets of public art.

Kearra: It could not be as simple as an exchange of soul for sustenance.

For unambiguously black queer artists who cannot count nepotism as an entry point to opportunity, making work that is oriented toward an end of the world from a black perspective (which is to say, the perspective of having never been in the world as such) is often isolating. Kearra’s work is, then, unsuitable for the world, as the full expression of their artistic ethos would signal something terminal for the world-as-such. Their work, then, has no linear temporal scale: the why of their work will not exist in their lifetime; the what of their work is process, not property.

Is this not a deeply dissatisfying reality?

Kearra: Dissatisfaction does not feel terminal to me: it feels incredibly generative. It comes after the understanding that, actually, the world as is cannot hold you by design. It is not that your place hasn’t been made yet, but that your place cannot be made. It is from this no-place that, in the first moments of the film, Kearra tells Richie: The concept of the world having to end is very appealing to ME.

Kearra: Once you come to the fact that you do in fact feel, where do you go from there?

Igniting the room’s shadows, a rising flame brews in the corners at the video channels’ seams. It threatens to spread and engulf the room’s three walls, and me along with them.

Kearra: A frequency to negotiate.

Nighttime rips through the screens, rendering the viewer alone and anonymous. The Blue Devil is announced first by a catalytic mix of Soca, noise, and techno. The soundtrack dredges the solitary Blue Devil’s fire preparation into view. A bucket of blue paint grants the Blue Devil absolution as they prepare their negotiation with the flame. Footage capturing the spirit of a J’ouvert (unbridled by surveillance) animates the Blue Devil, whose fire creates a fleeting light momentarily caught on two embracing lovers, unsurprised, before they turn and run back into the darkness. With no proclamations of an ethical or moral responsibility to “should” or “ought,” the Blue Devil embodies a chaotic and insistent claim to an incalculable debt. Fire is the guiding light. Black collective destruction remains a revenge fantasy worth dancing for. Freedom is not the word for it. The Blue Devil’s command for more multiplies.

As the conversation resumes, unfurling in low, slow pulses, the ouroboros bench translates the bass for the body of the viewer; its sonic delays and punctuative thrusts make for a deeply embodied experience. The bass’s watchful homecoming creates a state of anticipation. The bench’s chain-link skirt chases the floor in a rowdy cacophony of rattles and echoes. The sonic atmosphere makes the viewer feel studied by a watchful pulse that refuses to sync with their heartbeat. The pulse threatens to return, and to not. A metronymic dread.

What “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” reveals to me is that I dread what I want. I dread wanting. I dread that my wants exceed wanting, and, most of all, I dread my revenge’s loneliness.

Richie: Um, and sometimes performance is just de only way you can think to “appropriately” whatever that means or, like, publicly grieve. Like publicly feel something. Within every turn to the public lingers a desire for a witness.

Richie: Ent that white man say life is a stage?

As I see it, the state designs the stage and bankrolls the production.The performance’s benevolent witness showers the performer in identification and empathy. As the curtains close and the performance trails off, the performer stands alone, wondering if they’ve raised enough awareness or exchanged enough experience to live. In all ways, a libidinal investment in black suffering makes witnessing an exercise of desire, and performance a showcase of empathy’s discipline.

Kearra to Elana: This thing not fixable, nah boy.

The performer’s final confrontation with their witness occurs as everything goes up in flames. Perhaps paradoxically, revenge in “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” is in many ways about the stakes of nothingness wherein the ultimate revenge is the punishment of a confrontation with nothingness in its totality. With nothing to empathize with or to kill, the witness must instead be with the totalizing loneliness of there being nothing to salvage, nothing to own, nothing to know. Joy James said that a violent world cannot be addressed with therapeutic modalities; “pappyshow in the dark time, my love” undisciplines and demystifies violent responses to violence, and is haunted by the only outcome of a materialized black(ened) revenge: the world’s end.

Kearra: I am acutely aware of the dangers of metaphor. Why does one wish to be of / occupy a world that cannot include them?

Kearra: The concept of “the World” is void here.

9, 2019

Inkjet print on paper Courtesy of the artist