ARTIST STATEMENT
An Afrofuturist alien arrives on maroon territory to spawn futures of Black feminist liberation.
Una extraterrestre Afrofuturista llega a territorio cimarrón para iniciar futuros de liberación feminista negra. Fugitive Freedom Dreaming is a collage of performance actions filmed at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose in St. Augustine Florida between 2022-2023. Also known as Fort Mosé, this territory was established in 1738, and is considered “the site of the first legally sanctioned free African settlement in what is now the United States.” By integrating both performance art and experimental film through a Black queer decolonial feminist lens, the work is both an archival intervention and a means of imagining expansive futures of Black feminist liberation. The performance is a counter narrative to the dominant perceptions of the Spanish Florida colonial period for which evidence of rebellion is more often than not erased, overlooked, minimized, and/or for all intents and purposes, made absent from Floridian collective memory. As I walk the land, my role in the film takes up the space of an Afrofuturistic celebration of Oshun who is arriving on a land to which she must re-orient herself. Through grounding actions activated by walking, she reclaims her own bodily autonomy after having been both estranged from her own body and the environment. In this respect, I am making the work as an act of spiritual marronage.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Catron Booker (she/her) is an experimental filmmaker living on Shawnee, Cherokee, Osage, Seneca-Iroquois, Miami, Hopewell, and Adena land (now also known as Louisville, KY). Previous film screenings and exhibitions include Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Seattle Local Sightings Film Fest, Cologne International Videoart Festival, ACRE Projects, and the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco. She has also co-directed HABLAMOS, a PSA for the prevention of HIV/AIDS in collaboration with sexual health educators in Guatemala City as a UNESCO grant recipient. Catron holds an MFA in Acting from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Catron is currently an Assistant Professor in the African American Theatre Program at the University of Louisville. Catron is dedicated to work that imagines radically expansive Black futures.
© Catron Booker