Final project

Open Casket

I want to do a project exploring the ways that black women can, do, and desire to use their public bodies as a means to a specific ends. I will engage Eden Osucha’s analysis of privacy, as I have found it the most compelling space to search new possibilities of identities. Black bodies are attached to a history of slavery in America that posited them as,available to the public and unworthy of privacy. Black bodies were and still synonymous with publicity. From being bred, oiled, and placed on auctioning blocks to commercialized hip hop, where black male and female bodies are still exploited and displayed. I will engage the documentary on Emmett Till as a text. The history of lynching is another example of the public’s access to the black body. This division between private and public is crucial to the maintenance of racial hierarchy, and lynching exemplifies how the public black body can be used to maintain hegemony. Emmett Till’s story also offers the possibility that I want to explore further. When his mother chose to put his mutilated body on display, she used the black public body to a different ends. By doing so, she showcased (literally) the effects of this construction of public and private. I want to “open the casket”, so to speak.

Questions :

• How can black bodies be used to specific ends ?
• To what extent can our own bodies be used to reveals the flaws in the world around us ? The beauty ?
• Can publicity be claimed personally, the image and medium as the individual, the advertisement, whatever they choose ?

Plan : I will sit down with multiple black women and talk to them about these questions. A more concise version would probably be « what story do you tell with your body ? What is it you want to publicize ? » After we talk about that, I will work with them to represent the story they want to tell with their bodies with something tangible (photograph, drawing, letter, video, etc)

Product : I imagine a lot of the final versions will be photographs. I might paint their message on them and photograph their bodies. Depending on what they say, it might make more sense to photograph them and photoshop a specific background, or draw the whole thing. Or maybe they’ll work with me to write something, make a video.