Selected Curatorial
featured presentations at New INC, The Kitchen, e-flux Screening RoomA three part series of screenings and discussions with films by artists Lex Brown, Leila Weefur, Nile Harris, and Martine Syms. The series examined the horror within the mundane across films that queer the banal to reveal latent fears and desires.
In this docu-fictional short, Gopee annotates the parable of the soucouyant, a blood-craving, vampiric figure typically rendered as an undesirable older woman in Trinidadian legends. The screening was a accompanied by a conversation between curator Daniella Brito, Gopee, and Jewelle Gomez, author of the 1991 queer vampire novel, The Gilda Stories.
DEMO Festival, New INC, June 2023
HOW DO WE COMMUNE IN THE WAKE OF WIDESPREAD SOCIAL UNREST? WHERE DO RAGE AND PLAY CONVERGE? HOW CAN GRIEF INFORM COLLECTIVE LIBERATION?
The short films in this series ask these questions and then some, chronicling stories, histories, and speculative realities that gesture towards futurity and uplift organizing traditions in the past and the present.
Brito screened Blue Baby (1996/1997) and Heaven, Earth & Hell (1993) — two works inspired by the artist’s performance work from the 1990s. In the former, Harris embodies an infant who would have been aborted had their family known they would grow up to be queer. The recurrent performance intervention took place across public spaces in Los Angeles, ranging from shopping malls, to museums and cafés. In the second work, Harris conjures the Trickster figure—an archetype found across Afro-diasporic and Indigenous folklore—to recount the story of his first queer love.