←PERSONAL WORK
I Am Not Your Negro

“For some artists, the collage aesthetic not only serves as a way to see new thing or disrupt ways of seeing, but can also emerge from efforts to bring into view what has traditionally been marginalized and denied visibility due to a history of oppression (be it racial, gendered, or economic) and as such gives shape to what one might call a ‘survivalist aesthetic.’”

— Lorraine Morales Cox, Cutting Across Media

The practice of collage is closely related to the life of marginalized people; this is made apparent through its process, materiality, and signified qualities. Morales goes on to explain,”What a viewer or critic may see as revolutionary or radical in the development or employment of collage, may in fact reveal, articulate, or meaningfully affirm the thoughts and experiences of more diverse viewers.”ibid With this in mind, I decided that in approaching the concentration and recommunication of the documentary I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck, I would follow the process that I use for creating paper–based collages, but now with motion and time as new resources/variables. 

My process of collage allows me to work rapidly, as well as for the medium to more actively become a collaborator as opposed to a means to an end. Due to this, I often do not begin with a clear end goal in mind when collaging, and this holds true for this project. In working with motion design I have often struggled with controlling the variable of time. As visual people, designers are often taught to create a storyboard in order to illustrate key events in a piece of animation/motion design work, but I often became more confused. As I filled the x-amount of identically sized, identically spaced boxes, they helped me set checkpoints through the piece I would make, but never really told me how far apart these scenes are, and how we arrive to them. The tool of the storyboard lends itself very well to creating an overall theme and direction to a piece, but is no more important than a mood board is to static graphic design. In this project I decided to begin my work where it would end, the same way I do with paper–based collaging; in place of a sturdy piece of paper as my substrate I would now use an empty composition in Adobe After Effects. I sized the composition to 22 × 30 inches, the dimensions of the watercolor paper that I use as the surface for collaging.

When using the documentary as the primary source of the collaging I took special care in ensuring that the historical and emotional content was lessened as little as possible. This is unavoidable in adapting a 1.5–hour film into a 25–second motion collage, but I believe that I lessened the adverse effects through a number of methods. James Baldwin lived his life in opposition to white supremacy, so his direct rebuttal to a white intellectual adversary serves as the primary audio source in the piece. The backing audio is the song “Blaxploitation” by African–American recording artist NoName.