The Sis Uprising (2020)

THE SIS UPRISING

The Sis Uprising - Performance Video - Oct 8th 2020

Commissioned by The Sachs Program for Art & Innovation with support from The Slought Foundation, and Presented by The Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women at the University of Pennsylvania and Ricardo Bracho (Sachs Artist in residence.)

The Sis Uprising is a visual aggregate, showing of the disconnection between realities and moments, present presences and parallel futures. Made in Philadelphia The Sis Uprisinng is a conceptual Black spectacle on COVID-19, the protests, and the interwoven legacies of race, gender, sexuality and Black queer artistic insurgency adding to the narrative of what more do we do or what less do we do after all is said and done. The character is time. Not displaying time nor depicting time but abstractedly wearing time as skin. Whose skin is time in? The character IS time The skin time IS in - happens to be mine In some or many ways rotting then thriving. The skin time is in – is black.

To my sissy’s 

The Sis uprising was created during a time of questioning. The world was at large with a plague, And right before that I came to Philadelphia essentially looking for love. I was torn and beat up from the art world and academic fine art world in Connecticut. 

While starting to position myself differently as a performance artist and director the pandemic hit. It created a surge of unknown-ness, we were constantly trying to figure out if we would survive, it placed a lot of us in a position where we felt like we had to really be all that we could possibly be, now and in the moment…

I turned towards love in the most politically heightened year of my existence while falling in love with the co-director and filming this work together it inspired me and pushed me and vindicated any doubt that I had about my role as an artist who makes work dedicated to political failures and change.

The institution is funny because the institution wants you to be bold be direct groundbreaking but also stay within the confines of the bureaucratic language so that you keep food on your table and money in your pocket. This work really being funded by University of Pennsylvania was deeply a calling for me to address my connectivity to Philadelphia a city that segregated by it’s whiteness, historic violence on black and trans bodies, while being a city that is phlegmatic, virtu and iconic it’s own right. 

Philly lives and breathes its people, its culture, its name sake, its role as a cultural artifact for black and brown people. I experience the witnessing of police brutality, I experienced guns, smoke, sex, rioting, looting, 2020 was the year I cried the most. The Sis Uprising was for all of my queer folks mainly the sissies who were fighting with everyone, the soldiers, the black men and women on the street that can stick up for manhood and womanhood but not for queer liberation.

This work is a love letter to Philadelphia, this work is a love response to David Norori, whom without none of this work would have been created and my heart and intuition would not be so strong. This work is about the ideas that I hold in my body that are sometimes too brutal and too extreme to bare let alone comprehend. A lot of the movement came from me fighting to find my body trapped in a Covid cage explode my body upon anything that would let me say what I needed to say. I am so thankful for all who were involved and for so many people who encouraged me and supported me and uplifted me and pushed me to be not only better but more vulnerable, more soft, more disciplined. Thank you sissies. 

Thank you.

The Sis Uprising solely lives on The Slought foundation website - To watch the full film click the button below