Facing the Band: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the (Ana)architectures of Community Ties

A Conversation on Co-creation and Community Building

Thursday, November 19, 2020 | 7:00 PM

This keynote was live-streamed on the liquid blackness Facebook page. The recording can be found here.

Elissa Blount Moorhead is an award-winning artist, curator, writer, producer, and mother who explores “the poetics of quotidian Black life” by looking at the vestiges of private lived experiences. She creates artifacts that counter cultural erasure and “emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community building.”

Blount Moorhead is committed to collaborative creative processes that implement an anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist view of filmmaking and are instead propelled by what she describes as a “feminine energy.”

As partner in the production company, TNEG, alongside Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed, she strives to capture the intensities of black lives, the rhythms of lineages of knowledge and self-determination, as they are passed on and passed through, and, in this way, effect the very evolution of cinema.

Honoring her desire to model her stance after Miles Davis’s decision to play “facing his band,” as a way of expressing her centeredness in modes of black care, liquid blackness and AMPLIFY present Facing the Band: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the (Ana)architectures of Community Ties. This conversation with the artist will explore her anarchitectural interventions against the patriarchal logics of film production, and her investment in alternative living archives based on co-creation and community building.

Presented by liquid blackness and AMPLIFY 
AMPLIFY: media arts for collective strength, is an expression of the collective work of Prof. Susan-Sojourna Collier, Prof. Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Dr. Jade Petermon, Dr. Alessandra Raengo, Karin Smoot, and Matt Rowles (COTA Tech)

The event was supported by: National Council on Public History and the Department of Film and Media, Emory University.