Writer: Zoë Hopkins
Essay Mentor: Terence Trouillot
This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Memory Foam by Zachary Fabri, mentored by American Artist and on view at CUE Art Foundation from April 9 – May 14, 2022. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.
Video still from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound
[Image Description: A black and white image of the artist, a Black man, dressed in dark clothing, crouching underneath a bike rack on a sidewalk, his arms extended out in front of him.]
“I need to find a place to be
the air is heavy I am not dead”
—Toni Morrison, Beloved [1]
To tell American history is to tell a ghost story. And to speak of the American present is to speak of a landscape haunted by the afterlives of violence, from slavery to sharecropping to Jim Crow laws. Perhaps no author has better understood this than Toni Morrison, whose neo-slave narrative Beloved (1987) is animated by ghosts, in particular the malevolent spirit of a child who was killed by her then enslaved mother, Sethe, to free her from the horrors of plantation life. Aching with these painful memories, Beloved offers testimony to the reality that for Black people, living is an experience of encountering, remembering, and listening to the dead.
When I visited multi-disciplinary artist Zachary Fabri’s studio in December of 2021, Morrison’s novel lay alone on a shelf, perched in dignified solitude like a monument on its plinth. For Fabri, Beloved is not only a powerful negotiation of what it means to reckon with the memory of slavery, but it is also an aesthetic beacon of the inscrutable grammars of Black mourning and resistance. Fabri’s current exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation is in many ways a meditation on the text and the themes that ignite its pages. The show, titled Memory Foam, brings together video work, photography, and sculpture from 2017 to the present, and takes stock of what it means to mourn an event “when the event has yet to end,” as theorist Saidiya Hartman writes in her essay “The Time of Slavery” (2002). [2] Foregrounding his own body as a site at which to unravel this seemingly unanswerable question, Fabri’s works are provoked by the psychic and corporeal tangles of haunted life. They are dense with the labor of remembrance, of living among afterlives.
Fabri’s video Mourning Stutter (2017-2022) sits as the show’s centerpiece. The piece follows the artist on a circuitous journey through the streets of Philadelphia, in which Fabri was followed by a group of live spectators and a cameraman. Shot in black and white, Fabri’s photographs infuse the city streets with the texture of collective memory. Throughout the video, Fabri activates several predetermined locations including alleyways, street corners, and ledges with a series of intensely vulnerable, but simultaneously cryptic performances. Fabri selected these sites—most of which are noticeably off the beaten path—by deferring to an intuitive sense of how his body might interact with the space, more specifically how his body might resist it. Each encounter is difficult, even contrived. We catch Fabri crouching underneath bike racks or balancing on a curved rod, arms akimbo to maintain uprightness. Movement is cut with tension and struggle as Fabri oscillates between speed and slowness, bold action and quiet gesture. As viewers, we not only bear witness to the difficulty of Fabri’s performances, but we also become ensnared in it. The activations evade the ease of interpretation, fleeing from the hard edges of determined meaning. They are articulated through a vocabulary of abstraction that refuses to grant the viewer unfettered access to the Black body and its infinite significations. Like memory, the performances refuse transparency. Like grief, they require work. Each action, each fraught encounter between body and space, thus becomes a ritual in mourning.
The object of Fabri’s mourning is too heavy, too historically massive and complex to be limited to any one place or time: Yes, he is mourning those dead from the violence of white supremacy, but he is also mourning the precarity of his own living body as it moves through an urban landscape in which Black bodies are surveilled, policed, and killed. (As of the time of writing this essay, there are at least four unresolved cases involving a police officer fatally shooting a Black man in Philadelphia.) [3] As Fabri dances, runs, and writhes in the streets of Philadelphia, he moves with ghosts, within a temporal continuum wherein the contemporary urban landscape is shot through with an old, familiar violence that recurs over and over again. As Morrison writes, “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay.” [4]
Video still from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound
[Image Description: A video still with a red filter shows the artist, a Black man, crouched down and peeking out from a bush. The man is surrounded by leaves and small branches.]
Like Morrison’s novel, in which scenes of remembrance are layered into the fabric of the present, the rhythms of Fabri’s video resound with a chaotically recursive temporality. Though the performance itself was a durational project that Fabri recorded over the course of a day, the video is only eight minutes long: condensed, spliced, and rearranged into a non-linear unfolding. This disjointed narrative structure takes sonic form as the sound accompanying the video oscillates between a non-diegetic score and the urban sounds of the Philadelphia cityscape. Throughout the video, random flashes of red further disrupt and disjoint the timeline of the video. Here Beloved becomes a direct aesthetic presence: the color red is borrowed not only from its associations with violence and passion, but also from a decisive scene in the novel in which the ghost-child announces herself in “a pool of red and undulating light.” [5]
For Fabri, a disordered, indeterminate sense of time is vital to an aesthetic representation of Black ontology. It refers to the uncontrollably and impossibly repetitive reality of Black mourning, which is so full of bends, folds, and asymmetries; it is a practice of recollecting the past and the things we have since forgotten, the act of “re-memory,” as Morrison calls it. The unremitting pace of anti-Black violence takes sculptural form in The Memory Foam of George Floyd (2022), a work that bears the imprint of George Floyd’s body. Fabri approximated the shape Floyd would leave behind on a memory foam after determining the measurements of his body using research based in court and medical documents related to Floyd’s murder and the trial of officer Derek Chauvin—archives that are heavy with their own brutality. Unlike normal memory foam, Fabri’s sculpture does not return to its original shape: the memory of Floyd’s body assumes permanent form. It is a monumental statement of presence. But Floyd’s corporeality is of course indexed in what is not there. Loss becomes materiality as negative space is both laden with the weight of absence and filled with the ache of memory.
Re-memory also animates Duppy (2017-2022), a series of photographs in which Fabri pictures himself as a sort of phantom. To create the series, Fabri revisited a number of the locations where he performed in Mourning Stutter, and captured himself in chance moments of suspension, movement, and stillness. The photographs have a unique hushed attention to minor details in the urban landscape, to the neglected registers of space that feel eerie in their quietude. In turn, Fabri’s body and its surrounding landscapes emerge as sites of quiet haunting. Fabri’s return to these urban sites is itself a gesture of re-memory, of going back to architectures that are haunting his creative imagination. Fabri haunts these spaces in return. The nooks, glassy facades, and fenced in lots pictured in Duppy are uncannily still, fixed above time, but the evanescent blur of Fabri’s figure cuts through the silence of the landscape, sometimes like a shout and sometimes like a whisper. In three of these photographs, the artist’s body is not included in the frame, leaving behind noiseless architectural facades that are haunted with the memory of his body. In turn, we register Fabri’s figure as a fleeting, spectral absence: While Fabri himself eludes the moment of capture, the surrounding architecture echoes with his fugitive presence as it lingers outside the frame.
Video stills from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022, Single channel video with sound
[Image Description: A black and white image of the artist, a Black man, turning the corner from an alleyway on his right. The man is dressed in dark clothing and is looking down at his shoes. He turns onto a cracked sidewalk against a cracked brick building.]
The transience of Fabri’s presence makes Blackness legible as a site of recalcitrant fugitivity, but also of precarity. Duppy and Mourning Stutter reverberate with corporeal anxiety and vulnerability. Fabri’s body affects an intensely fraught relationship to the spaces he is meeting, assuming unlikely positions that eschew any pretense of regularity. He negotiates space in a decisively, defiantly performative manner: Balancing on the tip of a rock, randomly hiding in and reemerging from enclosed spaces, or walking at furiously agitated pace. At times he seems resolutely sure of his movements, and at others, they wither with hesitancy and trepidation. His movements are awkward and restless—a helpless stutter. These discomfiting confrontations between body and world are touched with the tension of the unknown, born of a world in which Blackness is viciously denied certainty of existence. Fabri’s exaggerated, bewildering movements reveal Blackness as a condition of moving through space with a heightened awareness of one’s own body and the certain-but-uncertain atmosphere of anti-Black violence that it is shrouded in. It is a condition in which, forced to constantly anticipate this vulnerability, one must also anticipate mourning.
But Fabri does not position himself as trapped within grief. Though he moves within it, he also dances to escape from it. Rather than enabling the cityscape to curtail his body, he seizes our conventional ideas of how to interact with public space and obliterates them, delighting in strange and unexpected ways in which the body can free itself. While his performances call attention to the relentless regulation of Black bodies in what we call public space, in moving so insistently outside of normative expectations of the body, he also performs a kind of Black movement that is abundant, uncontainable, and unconcerned with anything beyond its own freedom. In Duppy, Fabri dons a silk garment that catches and suspends itself in the air, expanding his presence across space and time. This same errant and transient material adorns the walls at CUE in a new sculpture titled We Need Some Kind of Tomorrow (2022). The title, which appears in bold lettering on the silk itself, is borrowed directly from the penultimate page of Beloved, a moment that is ablaze with the tender reflections and aspirations of Morrison’s characters. Like Morrison, Fabri insists that Black futures are not only possible but necessary. And so I’ll end by letting the words resound once more. “We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” [6]
[1] Toni Morrison. 2004. Beloved. Vol. 1st Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage. pp. 251.
[2] Hartman, Saidiya. 2002. “The Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4): pp. 758
[3] Moselle, Aaron. “4 Black Men Killed by Philly Police and the Officers Who Haven’t Yet Faced a Jury.” WHYY. WHYY, April 22, 2021. https://whyy.org/articles/4-black-men-killed-by-philly-police-and-the-officers-who-havent-yet-faced-a-jury/.
[4] Morrison, Beloved, pp. 43.
[5] Morrison, Beloved, pp. 9.
[6] Morrison, Beloved. pp. 323.
About the Writer
Zoë Hopkins is a writer originally from New York City. She currently lives between New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studies Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her writing and criticism have appeared in Artforum International Magazine, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications.
About the Writing Mentor
Terence Trouillot is senior editor of frieze. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.