Meditating on the “power of the return,” I am called to revisit the significant space of home, particularly a house that no longer stands, yet survives as memory. As Alessandra Raengo contends, it is a place that made me, nurtured me, and continues to stretch me. 

A recent conference call for proposals challenged me to think of blackness and sites of experimentation. Much like the garage in Darol Olu Kae’s Keeping Time (2023), the living room of my upbringing served as a gathering space—an intergenerational nexus of black life.  

As my short film 631 (2008) reveals, the living room I grew up in was also the living room my mother grew up in, in a house that held four generations of family throughout its existence. This space—always transforming, refurnished, rearranged, repopulated— embraced the highs and lows over time of simply being. To be exact, I am reminded of using the living room as our own black box theater, producing experimental “film” sequels as live-action performances. A photograph plucks from my memory the premiere A Nightmare on Elm Street (part 14 or something like that…), a story lost to time, but the residue it leaves behind is difficult to shake. Here I am as dream demon Freddy Kruger, despite how terrified I was of the character at the time. In order to play Freddy, one needs his iconic glove of claws—and a fedora doesn’t hurt. With a red shirt and some vampire fangs for an extra menacing effect, I raise my arm for the camera, ready to slash.

Perhaps it was our love of entertainment and entertaining that made the living room a playful space. My brother and I—plus whatever kids were around— took to performing our renditions of movies and music videos (where the fedora is revived for anyone playing Michael Jackson). My parents were keepers of the beat—hosting the parties we would observe from the top of the steps, peeking down into the living room when we should have been in bed. But who could sleep with all that funk in the air? 

Perhaps it was my mother’s experience growing up in the same living room, peering around the same upstairs corner into the gatherings her parents brought into the home, that engendered a sense of tradition—a chart to follow. My grandparents were social folks, enlisting my mom to serve snacks and take drink orders at their dinner parties. Though I never got to see this far back into the lineage, I felt—and continue to feel—the impact of holding space, keeping time, following charts, and leaving something for those to follow.  

Riffing on what film colorist Kya Lou calls the spiritual metadata of images, the information stored upon and within that computers cannot understand, black life in the living room is not simply captured but held. On the image is the small hole and faint halo of indentation that shows the picture was once held up by a thumbtack. The dark red smudges throughout eliminate any notion of a pristine preservation, but rather, a care through handling—the wear and tear of engagement. What is this substance? I can’t say what it is, only that it is there. Personally, I think it would be pretty cool if it were blood, enhancing the weight of me as Freddy cutting through from the image. It could be nail polish or BBQ sauce. I’m not investing in figuring it out so much as I am intrigued by returning to the living room, seeing, and producing a short film that passes through and passes on a slow archival practice of black study.