Black Atlantis: The Plantationocene

Black Atlantis: The Plantationocene is the documentation of a live audio-visual essay, or what I call PowerPoint cinema. It is part of my larger Black Atlantis (2014–present) project, which looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic. It takes as a point of departure, Drexciya, the late twentieth-century electronic music duo from Detroit, and their creation of a sonic, fictional world. Through liner notes and track titles, Drexciya take the Black Atlantic below the water with their imaginary of an Atlantis comprising former slaves who have adapted to living underwater. This wetness brings to the table a sense of the haptic, the sensory, the bodily, and the epidermal. What below-the-water and Atlantis brings back is the bottom of the sea, the volume of the water, the materiality of the space of the ocean, and other protagonists that inhabit the sea.