Multidisciplinary Artist Zalika U. Ibaorimi Will Lead Two Teach-Ins for The School for Black Feminist Politics
Image and biographical text of multidisciplinary artist and scholar, Zalika U. Ibaorimi.
Zalika U. Ibaorimi will lead two teach-ins for The School for Black Feminist Politics on ontological, spiritual, and material deviant making.
Multidisciplinary artist and scholar Zalika U. Ibaorimi will lead a two-part online teach-ins for the School for Black Feminist Politics, the political education arm of Black Women Radicals. Part One of her teach-in, "The Bottom Dwellers: On Spiritual, Material, and Ontological Sites of Deviant Making” is on Tuesday, April 5th at 6:30 PM EST. You can register for the teach-in here.
Part Two of “The Bottom Dwellers” is on Thursday, April 7th at 6:30 PM EST. You can register for the teach-in here.
About Zalika U. Ibaorimi: Zalika U. Ibaorimi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, doctoral candidate of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and 2021-2023 Carter G. Woodson Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia. She engages Black material and digital publics as landscapes to trace the human sexual geographies between the relation of the Black femme and spectator. Their relationality is tethered to the logics of shame, desire, and pleasure. She uses Black gender and sexuality analytics to engage Visual Culture Studies through the logics of Black Studies and Black Porn/Sex Work Studies. Ibaorimi specializes in performance, haunting, Black queerness, ontology, horror, flesh, sonics, the human and deviant modalities of Blackness. As a scholar and performance-based photographer, she uses the experimental approaches of research-creation to engage Black Study.
The Bottom Dwellers: On Spiritual, Material, and Ontological Sites of Deviant Making
Left: Image of Billie Holiday on the promotional graphic for Zalika U. Ibaorimi’s teach-in. Right: Collage featuring Zalika U. Ibaorimi’s grandmother, Toni Morrison, and Billie Holiday, designed by Black Women Radicals’ Visual Designer, Doriana Diaz.
About the teach-in: “The Bottom Dwellers” considers the pleasures and horrors of a place termed the “Bottom;” however, in two parts, this lecture also regards “the Bottom” as a material space and immaterial human/counter-human sexual geographic space as fleshy. Identifying the bottom as a fleshy space provides a cognizance of place within a placelessness that exists outside of the boundaries of the perceived Black deviant femme's significance. “The Bottom Dwellers” interlocks the creative and imagined applications of Black intracommunal relations of sexual shame, desire, and pleasure. Through Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), the life of Billie Holiday, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro (1899), I analyze how the materiality and ontology of those who position themselves at the precipice of “the Bottom” create the interlocking pathways between what is down below and what births the “jawn.”
Register for Part One of the teach-in here.
Register for Part Two of the teach-in here.