Fine Toothed Combs from Justin Thompson on Vimeo.
Fine Toothed Combs is a sound based installation that engages the violence of historic erasure and the necessity for a re-calibrated relationship with the archive which fosters our individual capacity to generate and to validate them. Based on the forms of harmonica combs( ladder like objects that structure the chromatic range of the instrument) and the harmonica pistol (taken from warfare technology created in the period of the Civil War in the United States), the works host a decade and counting growing archive of Afro-diasporic voices all recorded in Italy reflecting upon self contextualization and the hyper-contextual frame of Blackness.
Voices:
1) Rashid Johnson 2008
2) Hank Willis Thomas 2009 and 2012
3) Terry Adkins 2010
4) Kevin Jerome Everson 2012
5) Dave McKenzie 2014
6) Anike Joyce Sadiq 2015
7) Senam Okudzeto 2016
8) Nate Young 2016
9) Caroline Kent 2016
10) Enrico Riley 2017
11) Beverly McIver 2018
12) Abigail DeVille 2018
13) Sanford Biggers 2018
14) Tatjana Lightbourn 2019
15) Nara Seymour 2019
16) Andre Halyard 2019
The project was created for Press Play, a conference with an exhibition curated by Silvia Litardi at the British School at Rome.
