Baldwin's Nigger Reloaded II
Baldwin’s Nigger Reloaded is a performance work that reflects on the relevance and significance of Horace Ové’s film Baldwin’s Nigger, Baldwin’s words and how this piece as a document resonates with our contemporary societal-political experience. The work brings people together to re-imagine our world through film screening, discussions, collective writing, re-inscribing Baldwin’s speech, and dialogic re-enactment.
Initially created in 2014 at Iniva with the sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective, the work has developed into Baldwin’s Nigger Reloaded II, which has been convened in October Gallery London (2015); Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2015); Nottingham Contemporary (2015); A Language to Dwell In, James Baldwin International Visions, The American Univeristy, Paris (2016); Framer Framed, Art Rotterdam (2016); GOMA, Glasgow (2018) and Get Up Stand Up Now, Somerset House, London (2019).
Based on the speech given by James Baldwin in Horace Ove's 1968 film Baldwin's Nigger, this project is a continuing dialogue performed through a ritual of transcribing and rewriting Baldwin's provocation in different places and at different times in our global and local writing of our human stories. With each new iteration there is an invitation to people to re-script the text, bringing their ideas, experiences and views to the table. Each new script is collected and archived as a record of the different conversational responses and explore many contemporary conditions such as global terrorism, Islamaphobia, the refugee and migrant "crisis", police brutality, racism and anti blackness, mistrust of our political leaders, economically driven global power structures, wars, white supremacy, identity, gender, sexuality and the role of the archive in developing alternative narratives of politics, society and culture.
