061226 / STUDIO REPORTAGE
a studio report, a service invitation, and a lowkey album rec.
★ Announcement: Hey, y’all! I am facilitating Rehearsing Writing, a 1:1 writing consultation service for generating writing thru experimental pedagogies. If that sounds like a means of support you (or another artist/writer you know) have been needing, then check out the full Service Invitation in the newsletter archives for more details. You can schedule a free Intro. Call between now and June 23. ★
STUDIO REPORTAGE1 is a series in audio-visual.journal which drops y’all into the frequencies emitting from my current workflow. Expressed through one dimension of my research methodology,2 (call, listen, respond),3 I’ll gather notes and references for what I’m working on: sharing updates about this virtual journal and other parts of my art practice.
CALL / WHAT HAS BEEN CALLING TO ME?
Service thru connecting research & publishing with facilitation
Wandering around between studio sessions
Acquiring more books/key texts I’m referencing during studio time & on break days
LISTEN / WHAT MEANS OF LISTENING HAVE I BEEN ENGAGING WITH?
Annotation as generative writing
Formalizing my way of researching in relationship to Octavia Butler’s practice of Primitive Hypertext
Soundwalking4 as part of my dance/movement practice
RESPOND / IN WHAT WAYS HAVE I BEEN RESPONSIVE?
ICYMI: since my last report, there are 2 new entries in each of the series’ Rehearsing Otherwise (032526, 050626) and Listening Journal (2026-03, 2026-04)
Curated & hosted a screenings of Keeping Time (2023) and Dahomey (2024) for BoA Cinema Club. Also did a Q&A w/ Keeping Time’s director Darol Olu Kae during the screening (yay!).
Visited BoA’s first virtual gallery exhibition: SLATROP
My first published academic essay, Solange, Visual Albums & Black Representation had a birthday.5
Revised the main page of this journal
thanks for being an audience, and stay tuned.
— Paris ★
In a 2018 interview with The Drum, filmmaker Jenn Nkiru mentions ‘reportage’ as the consequence of process and discovery, a sentiment she learned from filmmaker Haile Gerima. I enjoy this use of the term, so I’m invoking it here. ↩
shout out Ayana Zaire Cotton, founder of Seeda School, for helping me express my orientation toward musicality and encouraging me to choose these pillars for a generative framework. and shout out to fellow Seeda School alum, isabetta bleu whose structure for sharing studio updates directly influenced me attempting to try this out. ↩
‘call and response’ is a Black technology rooted in traditions of musical expression, spirituality, and oral history/storytelling. when i was challenged to adopt a 3 part framework to structure my art practice, i considered how adding the pillar “listen” might help articulate what happens in between calling and responding. this is an active revision aimed to deepen my engagement with this ancestral form. ↩
My main reference point is the first soundwalk exercise in Hildegard Westerkamp’s essay “Soundwalking,” though sometimes I’m freestyling my own kind of ‘soundwalk.’ ↩
For all my fellow artists, do y’all celebrate on the date when certain works from your practice were released/published/transitioned into the public sphere? I’m feeling it out to see how it affects my relationship to work I haven’t dealt with in a long time. ↩