EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Embodied Literacy and Freedom Dreams is a cinematic manifesto and rehearsal space. Rooted in the Black Radical Tradition, the film practices citation as a tool for reading critically with thinkers, workers, and producers throughout history. By weaving together archival materials, global media artifacts, original video, and skate culture, it models a mode of reading our social, cultural, and political inheritances from the margins and actively writes a counter-narrative. The screening is accompanied by a projected Visual Bibliography: a real- time stream of its theoretical and cultural DNA. This offering invites you to read the world against the grain of dominance and exploitation in order to write a more democratic society into being. And to recognize society, and your immediate environment, as a social text with many readers and writers across spacetime. Imagine your own body as an instrument of annotation, and your community as a collective power to author a more just world.

ARTIST BIO

Greg Weaver is a multimedia artist and librarian based in Durham, North Carolina. His work combines and harnesses his lifelong obsessions: reading, late 90s and 2000s animated media, hip-hop, and skateboarding, to document the world as he sees it and speculate about worlds that don’t yet exist. His practice provides counter-narratives to the reigning stories and histories about the politics, culture, and lived experiences Southern, Black, working-class life and culture. Through a research-based approach, he uses collage, cinema, photography, and animation as a vehicle for synthesizing his analyses and observations. By reconciling his research with his own historical inheritance, social observations, and political imagination, Weaver attempts to trace ideas and narratives across spacetime in order to contest prevailing fictions about life in the margins. By centering the marginalized, historical and contemporary, Weaver hopes to find comrades throughout time and collectively determine what a world that empowers all people could look like.

IG: @voodustyle

Curated by Greg Weaver, Anthony Patterson, Dara Baldwin

Presented by the Durham Art Guild