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03
Still floating, Never Drowning: Black boys exist in realms of the Blue.
Experiencing Julianknxx’s film ‘In Praise of Still Boys’ is that it embodies the context of this quote “I don’t care whether something is liked by everyone, but I care very deeply that it’s liked and understood by those we’re trying to speak to.” So often, we encounter art that leaves us speechless, in awe of the creativity and the effort into articulating a language only a few will understand, being able to share your pain from a pit that does not exist in the mind of another but to allow a surface dive is a cathartic experience to the viewer and artist alike, it is allowing someone into your garden to study your plants without seeing the roots completely.
I know these still boys, they are well within reach. They let their tenderness and freedom arrive in the water, in every breath and in every stroke, they exist. Fighting for their survival in a place where refuge is not easily sought, seeking silence and comfort in a flow where their body drifts through the tides.
(Image from In Praise of Still Boys, Courtesy of the artist, JulianKnxx, 2020)
Julianknxx often adopts a poetic, metaphorical approach to explore the difficulties of visually representing loss and violent events or histories, the artist talks about how he fled from Sierra Leone at the age of 9 escaping from the civil war. The film is created in praise of still boys to examine his childhood and to seek healing from these experiences. Every shot is stunning, bringing the viewer closer to the moment. How often do we seek healing in a world where there is so much pain?
I hope we allow ourselves to feel everything and admit that we still love ourselves, even when it seems like that love has been long-gone. Sitting here at the Tate and I am reminded of Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight, somewhere along the lines of how blue light is used to frame black boys, coined into the term of the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney. It brings the viewer into a language meditating on the becoming journey of boyhood, the Atlantic ocean and the beauty of the magic. “At some point you gotta decide for yourself who you gonna be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you,” when Juan says the quote to Chiron in Moonlight after he lived a life away from what he always desired and wanted, I think that fate is akin to the embodiment of stillness.
Alphonso Walter Grant explains in his paper about the intersection of masculinity, sexualities, and Black visual culture that “our ways of seeing result from what we are taught to know or what we believe we know. When what we know is overdetermined by stereotypes and biases, what we see is too” simply put one is bound to learn what they know through the lens of hypermasculine culture.
The symbolism of washing away our sins in the water, the history of our ancestors diving into the water to escape their uncertain fate, the shores that carried us to freedom, letting go of your fears, putting the weight down and drifting away.
Water always finds it level, and for the still boy he lives to exist another day until a new stroke emerges in the water towards that stillness.
(Image from In Praise of Still Boys, Courtesy of the artist, JulianKnxx, 2020)