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August 25, 2020  /  conversation

Artist-to-Artist Conversation

manuel arturo abreu + Jaleesa Johnston (1 of 4)

manuel: Digitality of course is built on anti-blackness, right? Digital content and memes – they circulate in the same way that Blackness does, in a way that’s parasitic on Black people. Blackness gets disconnected from us and it becomes this sort of commodified, resold thing, and it’s very weird to see. I’ve been weening myself off social media slowly precisely because of this, because it’s so noxious from the very beginning to us getting the phones – from the enslaved West Africans that mine it to the East Asians that build it and kill themselves because they’re suicidal factory workers. And then we get phones shipped to us to be exposed to this constant digital lynching mementos. It’s done on purpose, I think. It’s meant to be fucking us up and distracting us. as Toni Morrison said, ‘The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction.’

A metal base with five legs sits on a concrete floor circled by computer cables and symbols drawn with chalk. Between each leg is an upside-down coffee filter. A transparent bowl on top of the base has small objects inside, including blue flowers and a lit beeswax candle on top of a battery on top of a plastic ice cube.
manuel arturo abreu, Herramienta, 2014. Glass, plastic, aluminium, USB cables, beeswax candle, collected keys, take flowers, dried eggshell powder, basket coffee filters.

manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet and artist from the Bronx. They studied linguistics (BA Reed College 2014). abreu works in text, ephemeral sculpture, and what is at hand in a process of magical thinking with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics – support their patreon here.

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