Dark Opacities Lab

Dark Opacities Lab engages with the evolving terms of opacity as a way to question the easy and extractive logics at play around race and representation, and to reorient around anticolonial struggles, global anti-racist social movements, and to center the intersectional and the internationalist. 

Dark Opacities Lab exists in three dimensions: Dark Study/Studio, a dual-purpose community reading room and informal art-making space; Dark Continuum, an interactive website; and Dark Display, in the form of small-scale exhibitions by minoritarian artists, theorists, practitioners.

Founded in Fall 2023, the lab is supported by the Canada Research Chair in Art + Racial Justice, as well as the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Tiohti:áke/Montréal. 

[excerpted]

What is the evasion of racial and colonial capture? How might we understand it, on the one hand, in political terms, and on the other hand, in aesthetic terms?

Enclosure/capture/
The prison/oversight
Carcerality 

Fugitivity/on the run/
Evasion/avoidance
Abolition

Representation/inclusion/
Visibility/legibility
Extraction 

Opacity/illegibility
Invisibility/inscrutability
Anticolonial

When we think of capture we think of the static the enclosed the prison the photograph. We think of the trap of visibility as per Foucault, and the trap door offered by Stanley, Tourmaline, and Burton. 

We think of the CCTV still, the blurry close up of those caught on surveillance footage, captured and placed into the local news, the national spotlight, deemed criminal based on logics steeped in white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. 

We think and theorize and study against capture as a means to think for those on the run, for those under cover, for those invested in fugitive planning, for methods necessary to enact liberation under accelerating conditions of unfreedom, surveillance, policing, and ceaseless harm.

We create and make manifest such methods of opacity as a means to divest from the diversity inclusion equity discourse. We are not interested in the administrative and extractive violence of producing art and cultural expression to behoove cultural institutions who are only now interested in the work of diasporic, BIPOC, immigrant, Third World communities. We will not fall for such platitudes when the bottom line is the bottom line, capitalist accumulation for the white walls and whiteness itself. 

Opacity emerges as an anti-colonial strategy theorized first by Édouard Glissant that has become increasingly of interest in certain fields of study. We draw from the foundational work of Francophone Caribbean anticolonial theorist Glissant to ask how opacity might work as a strategy against the overwhelming statist and capitalist desire for omnipresent sight, vis-à-vis surveillance and forms of policing. In turn, it is vital to reckon with the demand for visibility and representation for racialized and visible minorities as it plays out as part of liberal forms of inclusion, while understanding the contradictions of such forms of inclusion as they exist against the backdrop on ongoing structural violence against such communities (Lloyd, 2019; Hartman, 1997, Stanley, 2021). For example, as Saidiya Hartman argues, “the afterlives of slavery”—in which the practices of Black dehumanization, captivity, and premature death, continue into the present, despite state recognition of being an “emancipated” peoples. A framework of opacity understands how and why strategies of increasing visibility for marginalized communities, especially those of color, might actually hide or occlude quotidian and normalized structural violence. As these theorists have argued, the mainstream rhetoric of equity, diversity, and inclusion can often be predicated on a kind of violence, requiring the disavowal of historical injustice and harm so as not to express forms of racial grief and grievance.

McKittrick conceptualizes opacity as rigorous practice of study, wonder, and curiosity that prompts the aesthetic work of affirming life and aliveness as we live through, and counter, colonial and plantation violence. McKittrick locates black aesthetics as a site of learning, remembering, imagining, and creating. We emphasize how this definition of aesthetics loosens us from the grips of institutional art discourses of representation, retrieval, or reveal in terms of subjection and oppression. Rather, here aesthetics is a “working through,” by ideas and by stories, which shows up and takes cover in what we recognize as opacity.

Opacity is a method of living conditioned by moments of clarity that emerge in the post-1492 violent world order that also gives rise to action, activity, organizing, creating. “What do I mean, where have I seen this before?” This question formulated by McKittrick holds the power to identify moments and movements between opacity and clarity. 

I attended a screening of They Are We (dir. Emma Christopher, 2014) at a diasporic film festival. The film documents the reunion of Gangá-Longobá people severed by enslavement; one side in Perico, Cuba, and the other in a small village Sierra Leone. When the Afro-Cuban family visits the Sierra Leone side, they joyfully encounter physically the indigenous medicinal plant they’ve known through song exclusively for over 170 years in Cuba. The Dominican woman who facilitated a post-screening discussion verbalized her grief over indigenous practices lost in slavery.

“When you realize arroz con gandules would just be Jollof rice if your Puerto Rican ancestors weren’t stolen from Africa”
—@mmconze

LaTanya S. Autry, arts worker known for organizing the Museums Are Not Neutral movement, shares on Instagram her experience with trying to recreate a recipe in diaspora. Her experience speaks to the way diasporic literacy flashes between clarity and opacity and back again. 

“I am a child of the African Diaspora. lately I returned to trying to figure out how my grandmother cooked the sweet potato snack she’d offer me when I hanged out with her back when I was just a kiddo in elementary school. I don’t know how she made them. but I remember that she would cut them into discs.

I have tried to make them only twice. but I have thought about them all of my life.

this time I boiled them. I pierced the potato with a fork before boiling also I halved it because I didn’t want to ruin a whole sweet potato. (I was testing this out.) it looks like my method messed up the texture. it’s close, but not right.

and actually to tell the truth, I think this might be a yam and not a sweet potato. it’s not sweet enough.🙃

she’s probably watching me and shaking her head (lovingly though)

well, things get lost in the diaspora, but the memory is still with me. I will try again.”
—@artstuffmatters (LaTanya S. Autry)

Opacity prompts, activates, and wonders.