Wednesday, July 1st, ISSUE is pleased to stream I Have Been Alive. And I Intend to Live., a recording from writer Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves. The piece is part of the Isolated Field Recording Series, commissioning artists to produce field recordings to be streamed over the course of this challenging and isolated time.
At a time when many of us are at home and at our screens, taking stock and engaging new modes of planning, I Have Been Alive. And I Intend to Live. presents the inception of excavatory explorations and efforts at autobiographical inventory of a Black female writer born in the United States at the end of the twentieth century through a video timeline scaffold of the music, images, and verbal language she engages to chart her life experience as she marks 40 years of life on earth within such nested pandemics as COVID-19, AIDS, state-sanctioned violence, and myriad others. The source material determining the structure of her timeline is Greaves's frequent practice which comprises making note of how many days she has already been alive alongside a declaration of how many more she intends to live assuming a one-hundred year life span of thirty-six thousand five-hundred and twenty-five days. In the wake of the death of Sandra Bland, Greaves has made this private, life-affirming, praxis increasingly public so as to thwart any future efforts of genocidal forces should they be inclined to falsely claim she has taken her own life if she were to die in their custody. In the spirit of her unschoolMFA Mission Statement, and in the tradition of her ongoing work Florxabiography (2016 - Present), Greaves intends for I Have Been Alive. And I Intend to Live. to continue to expand and unfold in public presentation over the course of her life, ultimately reaching a running time of 11 hours and 47 minutes to be screened consecutively at midnight and then at noon on the 24th day of June in perpetuity.
I Have Been Alive. And I Intend to Live. begins at 8pm EST.
If you are in a position to do so, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves has asked all donations during the event be directed to BlackOUT Collective.
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (New Yorker, b. 1980) writes ethnobotanical literary criticism and collages detritus into heraldic devices. Greaves has most recently been published in The Brooklyn Rail, and Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing (Kore Press). Her chapbook Close Reading As ForestryThe Florxal Review.
+ voices of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye via composer John D. Boswell's “We Are All Connected” Symphony of Science (2009) + voices of Sylvia Rivera & Marsha P. Johnson from The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017) // ADJUA GARGI NZINGA GREAVES // NYC · 1980 // I Have Been Alive. And I Intend to Live. // JUNE · 2020 // for ISSUE PROJECT ROOM // isolated field recording series // 2020 JUL 01 W // with infinite thanks
