2022
Video, color, black & white, original sound composition
34:35
After Yellow, Green: Savage Sauvage Salvaje focuses on and confronts the racialized, impero-colonial view which correlates Blackness and Indigeneity with ‘savagery’, with the forest, the land, the jungle. This work confronts this position and its violent applications while also arguing that this conflation led to a rupture with ’the world’ in support of extractive practices that have both harmed our environment and countless human and non-human lives through climate change and the dual inventions of class and race. This work operates within multiple timelines, past and future, and approaches ‘wilderness’ as a collaborator in revolt and rejoicing. Stemming from histories of cimarrones and indigenous people sheltering and organizing from within forests across the Caribbean, the Americas, and ultimately, globally, this work combines first person historical accounts, poetry (Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, William Carlos Williams among others), contemporary voices from the zeitgeist (TV, Internet, radio, theory), and original text in a minimally intervened-upon landscape.
This work was commissioned by Tufts University Galleries and shown in the exhibition Backed Up Into Dawn
Performances + Voice Acting (in order of appearance) :
Yagrumo/Guanina/1.Sofía Córdova
Kárstica/ Padre Piedrahita/ 2.: Rashaun Mitchell
Acerola/ X/ : 3.Meg Jala
Narrator: Imani Mason Jordan
Director of Photography: Sofía Córdova, Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland
Musical Composition: Sofía Córdova + Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland (XUXA SANTAMARIA)
(with samples from Love, La Lupe, Ismael Rivera)
Audio Mixing and Mastering: Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland
Special Field Assistance: Tim Furstnau
Director: Sofía Córdova