mythicPotentialities

A sound-essay set in the Tallahatchie County Second District Courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, mythicPotentialities is an exploration of the event said to have galvanized the civil rights movement in America, the murder of Emmett Till, the trial that followed, and the way these event have been mediated through documentary text like Eyes on the Prize, The Murder of Emmet Till, and numerous other books, plays, poems and articles. The work uses as its entry point how these text, both documentary and fiction have constructed Till’s Uncle, Moses Wright, from a limited list of predicates, and as a result fall far short of capturing the complexity of his being. The project draws connections between this documentary predication of Wright, and Giorgio Agamben’s resistance to predication as expressed in his notion of “whatever being”. The essay also explores what happens when we destabilize our notion of what constitutes blackness with the absence of predication, and reconstitute it as an open space of creativity, play and invention, a place of pure potentiality, rather than a stable category of existence. Sonically the work also draws relationships between this absence of predication, and how sound space can be heard without the language we use to describe it, asking the listener to embrace the sensuous aspects of pure sound.