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This episode of Sum Ruminations is a recorded conversation, produced and recorded with generous production support from Herman Pearl at PearlArts Movement & Sound in Pittsburgh, between artist collaborators jaamil olawale kosoko, Dahlia Li, and JS Wu.
Across two episodes the three collaborators, friends, and artists discuss how formative childhood experiences of estrangement, queer/femme sociality, quixotic experiences of race, mystical experiences with media, and the various joys and difficulties of embodied artistic labor shape what it means to make and be made through aesthetic practice.
Sum Ruminations appears on Podalot, the podcast of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. This limited series builds on the work of the “Just Art” faculty/staff research seminar. More information about Just Art and Aydelotte can be found here.
jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American choreographer, author, performance artist, and curator. jaamil’s interdisciplinary practice merges performance, video, sculpture, and poetry, exploring queer Black theory, emergence, and critical rest-care strategies for BIPOC+ liberation and reparation. jaamil’s works including The (chrysalis) Archives, Black Body Amnesia, Chameleon, séancers, and Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia have toured to venues including EMPAC, Fusebox Festival, The Guggenheim Museum, ICA at VCU, Montréal Arts Interculturels, Museum of Arts and Design, New York Live Arts, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among many others. jaamil has received a Doris Duke Performing Arts Technology Lab grant, LMCC’s Extended Life Residency, a Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, a La Becque Residency (Switzerland), two MacDowell Fellowships, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. They have held curatorial positions at New York Live Arts and FringeArts, and lectured at Princeton University, The New School, Bennington College, and Sarah Lawrence College. Visit jaamil.com for more information.
Dahlia Li is a scholar and artist working between the fields of dance and performance, screen-based media, critical diaspora studies, and feminist, queer, and trans poetics. Her manuscript-in-progress, Stranded Affect: Decolonial Screen Ecologies and Diasporas of Disappointment explores these research interests through a global south framework. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College. She received her PhD in English with certificates in Cinema and Media Studies as well as Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s studies from UPenn. From 2022-2023 she was a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow through the Whitney ISP. She has performed, exhibited work, and taught artist's workshops at a variety of venues in Europe and North America including the 2016 Venice Biennale, the 2022 Tanzkongress, Schmorévaz Project Space, p0nderosa dance center, and EmergeNYC, among others. Her writing can be found in The Routledge Companion To Dance and American Popular Culture, The Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, PA Museum Online, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, and the exhibition catalog for "The Dancing Plague" at GaMEeC Bergamo.
JS Wu (they/she) is a scholar and artist thinking about the intersections of labor, technology, and identity in the broadly defined field of animation. They are an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Their academic work has been published in Animation Studies and ASAP/Review. They have also published graphic essays on race and new media for general audiences in The Believer and ANMLY. They are currently working on an academic monograph, The Animating In-between: Producing Race in Studio Animation, and a book-length comic, Asian American Psycho: A Graphic Novel.
