CONSPIRACY

Formal and discursive concerns of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich surrounding the representation of the black female body are reflected on Conspiracy, a work co-created with Simone Leigh. Subjectivity and sorority are united in this experiment where both artistic languages of their female creators are put in dialogue. The short film starts as an ode to the manual, through a frame from above documenting the artistic process of creation. The black and white picture is imbued with a ritual aspect when some hands begin to show objects on a black background, a straight reference to Hands of Inge (1962), a short documentary showing the creative processes of the black sculptress Ruth Inge Hardison. And this is not the only inspiration of the black cultural imagery. Leigh and Hunt-Ehrlich include text fragments from Robert Farris Thompson and Zola Neale Hurston, which, along Jeanne Lee’s music shape a hybrid and subversive piece, at whose core is the need to revendicate the female cultural production at the African diaspora. Conspiracy is revealed as a cinema mirror in whose reflection is the collective spirit of the creation attached to the Leigh/Hunt-Ehrlich’s duo. The result is a tribute to the past, but also a shout from the present that, at the same time suggests the possibility of a different future. All it through a powerful artistic exercise that challenges the white and colonial gaze that has delimited museum and ethnographic contexts. As an alternative to the permanent, Conspiracy decides to choose the ephemeral, destruction as a pathway towards a needed rebirth. That is why the fire, that puts an end to the object created. And women (Leigh herself, her assistant, and her mentor Lorraine O’Grady) –watching everything, until there’s nothing left but ashes, where it’s possible to start again. DANIELA URZOLA