PLACE:

Nashville // Crockett

BIO:

Viktor lé. Givens‘ work, which is primarily performance, creative writing and found object installation, exists in a continuum of making that is inhabited by writers and storytellers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. The vocabulary used to categorize their style has trouble fully holding them, so what’s required is a new category. One that resembles a recipe kept alive not with precise measurement, but through muscle memory, making, and an awareness of hidden ingredients. Their work is called fiction and speculative, but true cultural workers resist the limits of those labels–describing it only as imagination and conjecture doesn’t recognize the knowledge, truth, and undefinable substance that is embedded within it. Viktor le. Givens is a found object installation performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to activate spaces for site specific public rituals. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with pre and post modern spiritual theologies, le. Givens hopes to extend and reimagine the folk customs of his family . His material archive is comprised of the forgotten and discarded household items found during excavations of East Texas, Louisiana, Havana Cuba and Mexico City. . Through the accumulation of these rich cultural artifacts , le. Givens. seeks to create spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual memory.

PROJECT:

Part archeological archive, part experimental cultural arts intervention, Mo’lasses is a Afro surreal performance work rooted in extensive ethnographic and folkloric research over the past decade both in the American South and among multiple nodes of the Black Atlantic.  It is born from an extended archival excavation project investigating the material culture and folk customs of the artist’s own ancestors and his ancestral lands in rural East Texas. The ownership of that land, beginning in the 1892 by Solomon and Lula Givens, enabled his family to pioneer what historians have termed a freedom colony. These colonies of freedom were consecrated land spaces that allowed newly emancipated African Americans the time and space to self govern outside the purview of white surveillance. A surveillance that disallowed the practice of African culture in North America throughout the preceding two centuries.  Givens’ excavation enables the re-merger and reintegration of traditional African cultural-spiritual-performance practices into the memory of the historical periods from which his unearthed artifacts emerge. The work stretches our cultural literacy: how to read and reinterpret the sweet complexities of Blackness, our memories, objects and rituals .  The title was inspired by a hand sewn quilt lined in sugar sacks retrieved from his families vacant estate, it also references moments in both the history and in the process of refining sugar cane, for which Blackness can be understood both as an historical subject (of the men, women, and children whose hands accomplished that process) and as a pungent metaphor.  Givens asks, “What is it about Blackness that makes us so damn sweet?”  What was so irresistible that it attracted European nations to vivisect Africa and export her people? Beyond dwelling in the horrific memory of the separation from Africa, how can we cultivate that potent nectar we still possess, carried urgently forward to this present moment, and now harness it for our own benefit and for all Africa’s descendants living in the here and now.