Che Applewhaite
I AM THE WORLD: Scene I, 2022
The video is approximately 8 minutes long and plays on a continuous loop
I AM THE WORLD: Scene I
I AM THE WORLD: Scene I is a speculative video forming part of a project entitled Scenes of Category Destruction. The project emerged from the narrator’s viewing of a 2014 single-take viral video filmed in Philadelphia for the “AFTERMATH” series of ongoing YouTube archive, “Ballroom Throwbacks TV”. The work, one in an ongoing series of video-led presentations, narrates a search for ways of seeing in between the end of this humanist world and the next one, in which, as Selvin “MC Debra” Mizrahi already said in front of Kelly Gorgeous Gucci, they are the world. Their networked moving images guide our crossing to an alternative present; one made of and for transformed genres of existence, in which the narrator finds his seeing - and possibly, his being - anew.
Scenes of Category Destruction
Scenes of Category Destruction approaches the recorded social life of US ballroom as filmic evidence of ritualized modes of worldly being. It explores how participant image-makers manifest afro-fabulative practices with, for and against the camera.
Dedications
I AM THE WORLD: Scene I was made after and with Jénèva Leech, the Ballroom Throwbacks TV YouTube archive, “M Archive: After the End of the World” (2018) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life” (2019) by Tavia Nyong’o, Playback (2019) by Agustina Comedi, and Videogramme einer Revolution (1992) by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică.
Credits
Research | Film Direction | Edit | Script | Production | Secondary Cinematography | Sound Mix | Voiceover: Che Applewhaite
Original Music | Sound Design: Pavel Lebedev
Production: Ben Evans James, transmediale / Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg
Archive Material: https://www.youtube.com/user/BALLROOMTHROWBACKS/videos
Production Support: “Vision And Power” Seminar, David Joselit, Harvard University Department of Art, Film And Visual Studies
Guide Quotes
“we could always see through our belly buttons. we just didn’t know what seeing really was before then. we depended on the periscopes in our heads to warn us, to show us, to teach us the good. we walked in the world like defense towers, but that wasn’t the real shape at all. ”
“I also believe that there must be an “I” that speaks through a film. But this does not have to be the “I” of a man or a woman who made the film. It is rather the “I” of the film construction. Through this “I” the thought comes alive. Or: spiritual topicality.”
“Afro-fabulation of black art and performance corrects the representationalist and
periodizing terms of our aesthetico-political order...by presenting the falsification of this “true” order as a pathway toward its correction.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 177.
Christa Blumlinger and Harun Farocki, Ein ABC zum Essayfilm = The ABCs of the essay film, trans. Margit Grieb (Harun Farocki Institut, 2017).10.
Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York, UNITED STATES: New York University Press, 2018),
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harvard-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5345730. 23.