Potential Afterlives: Cauleen Smith on the Relation of Film and Performance

In this conversation with the book’s editors, filmmaker and multimedia artist Cauleen Smith discusses the possible afterlives of her works— as documentation, as reenactment, and as memory. She explains the relation between film and performance, noting that she approaches every project as a film, whether or not it results in one, and stresses the importance of embracing contingency in her work. Works included in the discussion are Drylongso (1998), Remote Viewing (2011), Sojourner (2019), and Space is the Place (A March for Sun Ra) (2011), the last of which documents the Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band, a “flash mob” Smith organized in Chicago, for which a high school marching band played the music of Sun Ra. She also speaks about Black Love Procession, a collective performance—part celebratory parade, part political protest—that she organized in Chicago in 2015. As Smith explains, revisiting the past—as she has done in several different ways— has the potential both to resurrect old traumas but also to build a better future.