The Is
A radical interpretation of the present is dependant upon our approach to archiving the past.
The title is a reference to the 1978 Motown film The Wiz, which was originally written for the stage and performed on Broadway in 1974. The Wiz is a retelling of Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) through an African-American cultural lens. The iconography of The Wizard of Oz is embedded deeply within the collective consciousness of many cultures and the Motown version served to expand it’s mythology for Black audiences, leading to it becoming an important touchstone for many across the diaspora.
In this work, I begin with the assertion that cultural artifacts occupying a large amount of space in the collective consciousness carry an equivalently large potential for effective reinterpretation and subversion. My intention with The Is is to deconstruct and reconstitute the subject’s artifacts in order to facilitate a renegotiation with personal and collective memory.
The Is is a WIP. The tests shared above feature music by Toru Takemitsu and Alessandro Solbiati