I try to not think of those things that we cannot control, but I think if we continue to work with positive attitudes, conditions will be better for more people.

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

It's not possible to get any distance from my project: being alive. Objectively, from the outside you might say, my life is terrible, unbelievable. And it's true, I hate this. I hate the way I am at the moment. But there is no objective view, I am here, in it, and there is nothing else, and this fact brings with it many things that make it of course easier. And beyond that there are many other things to think about.

Yeah, there were a lot of brave people who stood up. Then, you know, it cost Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Viola Liuzza and a lot of the others their lives, but they were on the right side of history, and they believed if they made this sacrifice that it would work out. And whenever I get discouraged about everything they stood against rising up again, I realize there just are no public, or permanent, victories. You have to keep fighting for freedom.

It’s really a kind of roadmap or a record. It’s breadcrumbs in the forest. It’s like the hieroglyphic on the wall. It’s me attempting to code some sort of roadmap that helps us think and act our way out of these conditions.

So I don’t ever feel the urge to kind of rewrite the work.

When I start a project, it’s a kind of investigation and curiosity at the beginning. I’m basically culling materials. I’m gathering. A lot of the work takes on a collage aesthetic. So I am thinking through an idea and then gathering all of the supporting documents. In some ways it’s essayistic. I’m attempting to put forth an idea or a thesis. There are assertions that are being made, and what can I use visually, whether it is 16 millimeter film from the past or things that I shoot myself, whether it’s interview that I go out and get, whether it’s me painting on film and creating some sort of abstraction that alludes to or gestures towards the assertion. It’s playtime at the beginning. It’s almost like a very active brainstorming that requires me to go out and find materials as well as make notes, as well as look at footage as well as read. It’s investigative curiosity at the beginning, this phase of questioning and garnering. And at the end it’s instinctual. It’s a sweet spot. There have been times where I’ve gone out and presented something thinking that it’s done and then brought it back. I’ve gotten audience reactions, brought it back, turned it up a little bit, and then it was done. Sometimes my finishing process requires me to see it with a large group of people.

Certain people really aren’t getting their emails answered. Certain people are getting their emails answered at a very deliberate and delayed rate. There are certain things that I’m passing up that people think that I should be taking, jumping at and clapping over. There’s a certain amount of refusal happening right now because I’ve got to prioritize my health and my ancestral mandates.

The spiritual practice is West African–derived and earth based, and there’s a process of ancestral veneration that is a hallmark of this tradition. I’m talking to them and seeking their help, petitioning them, thanking them, praising them. Attempting to listen and be led.

I’m leaving these things behind so that in 2076 someone can say, “Oh, wow. OK, so this is what they were dealing with,” and maybe they can draw some sort of parallel to whatever is happening in their reality right now, the conditions that they face right now, as much as I can draw a parallel from what Fred Hampton was talking about to what I’m experiencing now.