Romi Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Their work investigates the personal, political, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black Feminist technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world that reduces land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. From building open-source platforms to upend the continued practice of solitary confinement to crafting community-based archives to combat gentrification, their artistic practice investigates cartographies of ancestral intelligence, unassimilable data, algorithmic violence, and blackness.
 

“I am interested in how particular methods of rendering and conceptualizing racialized space obscures the messy entanglements of power, encounter, domination, and improvisation that constitutes what geographer Katherine McKittrick calls, ‘a black sense of place,'" shared Morrison.
 

Last summer, in response to global protests combined with doom scrolling, their collaborative piece Soundings made with Loren Britton for Kunstalle Amsterdam was a bookmarklet that dissolved your social media stream and replaced it with a space for repose. Rather than encourage total disengagement as an act of self-care, the viewer is gently carried into the feminist act of water painting while Morrison and Britton read and project words of Black Feminist Poets Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. “These are the texts that I return to,” says Morrison, “that feed me, that make each day more livable.” In this way, the bookmarklet hopes to interrupt the sense of urgency and replace it with a sense of agency.

SCI-Arc Channel discusses this and more with Morrison alongside the politics of fetishizing suffering within their artistic practice.

Crew Credits:

Production:
Creator and Executive Producer - Hernán Díaz Alonso
Producers - Marcelyn Gow/Reza Monahan
Segment Producers - Li Pallas/Tanita Enderes

Post-Production:
Story Producers - Li Pallas/Vivian Charlesworth
Editors - TinDragon Media/Reza Monahan
Sound Mixer - Christina Nguyen

Additional Images and Video Provided by Romi Morrison

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