Dominique Duroseau

Dominique Duroseau’s black-cloaked figure in her videos, like negro quota: required to pause (2018, 2019 edit), reveals a figure grappling with cohesion and stability. Among other references, the figure’s actions are scored by the words of James Baldwin on the future of Black people to be “as bright and as dark as the future of the country.” However, the bright white space overwhelms the black figure struggling to take shape, and speaks to the exhaustive actions Black people are forced to undertake in order to assert their presence within spaces marred by white-supremacist values. -David Rios Ferreira

visible conditioning (2019)
digital photography, performative photography
varied dimensions

negro quota: configuration (2018)
digital photography; performative photography
varied dimensions image sequence

My recent work has focused on exploring and continuing abstract narratives portraying various aspects of Black identities/issues via different media: photography, performance, video, audio, etc. I’m exploring issues that exist then, now, and that could possibly seep into the future. The black-cloaked self-portraitures continue to address ongoing issues of systemic tokenism, prevailing effects of colonialism and white supremacy. “Negro Quota” began as a diagrammatic grid installation of over three hundred fancy white cards daubed with white-out, and five marked with small matte black marks. This developed into a series of objects with “Negro Quota” screen-printed and etched onto them, amplifying the subtext of objectification, dispensability, and mocking empty performative activism gestures regarding diversity and solidarity. These objects have been: fitted caps (one lives in an acrylic display box), a $40 black cotton tote bag, a series of cheap white t-shirts and men’s briefs, prisoners' spit hoods and steel handcuffs. 

In the photographs and video, I revisited my initial diagrammatic approach; my body strives to balance presence and existence through an abstraction of movements and stillness. Despite the scale of my body and presence drawing marks, making patterns, these gestures seem unable to leave any trace, instead folding and collapsing into themself. The white space remains untouched and the ratio unbalanced. There are two versions of this video: one reduces the speed rate dramatically, layered with my distorted voice reading different actions, later layered with a normal reading of a passage addressing scale, aspects of folding, and distortion from the book: Folding Architecture. The second version, the rate is slightly higher, layered with an audio mix of stolen voices: Amiri Baraka, Marvin Gaye, James Baldwin, and myself reading texts out of context in a non-linear format. Extracting and reshaping everything anew offers a dichotomy of darkness and hopefulness, wrapped in a painful realization — Baldwin uttered his words nearly sixty years ago and his words have remained problematic and relevant. -Dominique Duroseau