Portia Cobb, b.1954 Bronx, NY

embracing a Radical Black Aesthetic

I have typically been a maker of short, single-channel, non-linear documentary video’s since 1989. While a Graduate student at San Francisco State University, in its “experimental film” program-my early work originated in 16 mm film, but my Graduate Thesis, No Justice No Peace! Young Black ImMEDIAte (1991) was completed using small format analog video (hi-8). It was a new medium, was cost effective and offered the freedom of accessibility.

Today, I work in HD media formats (video, sound & photography). I describe my body of work as one that is hybrid: part personal diary, ethnographic field notebook & documentary essay.

On embracing a Radical Black Aesthetic:

I am anchored by the legacy of Sarah Maldoror (b.1929-d.April 13, 2020). I will forever be inspired by her voice and attention to the archive; to memory and memorial. These are ways I have spoken of my praxis-making. Following her death, I am only now discovering how kindred in spirit we are-through the lens of her early works-her short films and her love of the poetic. Sadly, her work wasn’t celebrated enough in her prime.

“As long as I have breath in my body (an expression of my mother’s)”- I will forever call myself-a disciple of Sarah Maldoror.

I am deeply interested in themes of memory and forced forgetting, home, rooted identity, flight, flux, reclamation and restoration. My inspiration is fueled by a personal quest to examine the condition of my own Two-ness within the realm of African and American identity-and further complicated by the knowledge of my Gullah Geechee maternal heritage.

In 1999, I began returning to the interiors of Low Country South Carolina; to my family’s homestead. Time spent there has greatly impacted me as an artist.

This is when I began to build an archive of recorded oral histories, and other site specific media that would include photographic essay and moving image. These documents chronicle a past which is still present.

My practice is to uncover, collect, contextualize, and re-imagine.

The harvested materials from this collection of information-and their “chance” arrangement, often commands radical forms and new genres. Parts are temporal, ephemeral and performative-leading me to claim and embrace a practice that is experiential and cinematically expansive. There are times that I enter the frame as interpreter, or interrupter and step beyond it…into the field.

This way of working has pushed me, the artist to become the medium for the story; and has allowed me to activate my own radical black imagination and aesthetic, fluidly-where I hold space for my work to be projected on screens, looped on monitors in the gallery, experienced as temporal mixed-media installation or as collaborative open air-performances.

Rooted: The Storied Land, Memory and Belonging, 2017-18 at The Lynden Sculpture Garden-was a project that allowed a lab like environment to play with all of these elements in an open space. This inspired interactive and collaborative conjuring-where documentary fragments were bridged with re-imagined, reclaimed and rewritten histories.

I am currently developing a collaborative performance work titled “Seeking” -a second chapter inspired by stories i’ve recorded of my mother’s cultural memory of her girlhood in the Low Country. This work will examine ritual & rite of passage through a lexicon specific to place(s)-South Carolina & Sierra Leone, West Africa.