On dreams
“I’d rather have a memory than a dream”: Collective Climb Presents a screening of Arthur Jafa’s “Dreams are Colder than Death” (2014)
If the cultural memory of slavery and its afterlives find its residency in a collective repository of images and signs with uniquely sedimented investments in the “national treasury of rhetorical wealths,” — Sara Bartman, Angela Davis, The Little Rock Nine, to misname a few — contending with this overdetermined site of market reductions, cultural abstractions, and affective privatizations announces itself as a critical invitation through intervention. “What does it (they) mean?” in this way functions as a dual sign of inquiry and disruption, curiosity and friction. In the spirit of this twin process, Collective Climb then invites (to interrupt) our growing friends and family in a remote screening of artist Arthur Jafa’s “Dreams are colder than death” in order to explore what we are to precisely make of a national holiday as fraught, familiarized, and fantastic as MLK Day. “A day of service for whom?” “In memoriam of what?” and again “What does it (they) mean?” are but a few of the questions we look to explore through Jafa’s sardonic and incisive meditation on the legacy of an iconic black leader and the high status of blackness. More about the programming and documentary below:
“Arthur Jafa’s critically acclaimed experimental documentary Dreams are Colder than Death (2014) lyrically reflects on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and contemporary black experiences in the United States. The film layers and weaves together a range of imagery with narrations from artistic and intellectual visionaries such as filmmaker Charles Burnett; poet, critic, and theorist Fred Moten; artists Wangechi Mutu and Kara Walker; and scholars Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers. Initially made to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, Dreams asks what it means to be black in this country today. As Jafa stated about this work, ‘It was always about creating a platform for black folks—as I say, uncommon black folks—and for specialists to voice their feelings about where they were but ostensibly where we are, collectively.’“
Disclaimer: Film depicts images of American lynching, non-full service sex work, and profanity. Viewer discretion advised