Steffani Jemison filmed Escaped Lunatic on the streets of Houston in collaboration with a local park
Steffani Jemison filmed Escaped Lunatic on the streets of Houston in collaboration with a local parkour group. The video captures a steady stream of predominantly Black men running through the frame, hurtling through gates, sprinting down highways, and avoiding obstacles. In the beginning the camera is static, which gives the scenes an uncanny echo of the slapstick chases of early cinema; indeed, the video shares its title with 1904 farce about an escaped convict. By the end of Jemison’s video, however, the camera tracks the figures closely, almost claustrophobically so. The work leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but there’s an undeniable urgency that forces you wonder what these men are running from or towards. The urban decay of much of the Houston scenery gives us some potential clues. It’s hard not to read the video in line with the videos of Black men fleeing and dying at the hands of police, which have reached a fever intensity over the past few years. As Thomas Lax described, the work and its title remind us “that black folks are perceived as fugitives whether they are running or just have their hands up.” The raw graininess of the footage cannot help but evoke the imagery of videos like the one of a fleeing Walter Scott gunned down in South Carolina by a white police officer… and countless others. The repetitiveness of the video parallels the sickening regularity of episodes of police brutality—as well as the continued violence of their circulation in digital spheres—and the cycles of pain, outrage, platitudes, and political inaction that we watch unfold with each new shooting. I wouldn’t dare suggest that this is the reading Jemison intended, but such is the power of her work that it’s open to both ambiguous and damningly critical interpretations.Steffani Jemison, Escaped Lunatic (still), 2010-11 -- source link
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