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2024

Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe
School for Poetic Computation



The School for Poetic Computation is an experimental school of interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware, and critical theory.

Venessa participated in the Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe course engaging in 10 weeks of critical theory and hardware interdisciplinary study stewarded by American Artist, Zainab Aliyu, Taylor Levy and Che-Wei Wang. She joins in the collective imagination which investigates the surveillance of Blackness and the construction of whiteness as “neutral” within high technology.

Its summative publication, Speculative Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe, compiles open blueprints, creative narratives, and provocative illustrations, the course’s publication imagines a space where Blackness forms the foundation of virtual creation. These 40+ imagined tools, technologies, and practices probe and reimagine the complexities of the digital world, countering the obscured layers of computing and its embedded biases. 
 


2023
Master of Arts with Honors (M.A.)
Film Studies Communications, Media, Visual Culture 
Specialization in African Studies
Carleton University


                                                                                                                                                                           

As an ongoing research, Venessa dedicates her life’s work to providing the first-ever comprehensive study on the subject of eroticism and the nude Black female [-presenting] form in African Cinema. Its foundational thesis Within Double Restraint: the Aesthetics & Dialectics of Erotic [Re]presentation [Library & Archives] advocates and questions the application and uses of eroticism as an analytical lens. The monograph unveils and investigates such representations while relying on theories from Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, Visual Culture, African History, Political Science, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Film Studies.

One of the most useful concepts through which one can understand the problematic of erotic representation in African cinema is the notion of “double restraint.” Reflecting itself through a form of scopophobia, that is, a restrained response to its communities’ moral codes, and the West’s voyeuristic and fetishistic scopic intrusion towards the Black body. Protectionist conceptions towards sexuality in both African cinema as well as in Black feminist scholarship are partial responses to colonialism’s legacies establishing stereotypical tropes of an insatiable hypersexual African physicality.
On the other hand, by bringing attention back to pre-colonial oral traditions, exuberance in erotic tales and their practices do indeed reveal an emphasis on sexual pleasure. Indeed, by relying on indigenous cultures, Within Double Restraint questions the present to justifiably reposition eros as an “African” mode of film theoretical discourse. Although, through contemporary society’s increasing pornographication (Chul Han) of the visual field, the consequential harms of the historical wounding gaze (Afi Appiah, 2023) inevitably fall on dark-skinned women. Implied limits of taboos and transgressions have been redefined and renegotiated; reflectively we discover whether Black African cineastes choose to adopt them.
 
Keywords:
eroticism, sexuality, voyeurism, visibility, showability, spectatorship, affect, scopophilia, scopophobia, imaginary, pleasure, desire, agency, stereotype, fetichism, libidinal economy, protectionism, monstration, secrecy, censorship, taboo, transgression, death, liberation


    Read the Published Thesis Here

    Supervised by Dr. Aboubakar Sanogo




2019
Bachelor of Arts
Double Major in African Studies and Film Studies
Carleton University


2015
Diploma of Collegial Studies
Arts & Culture
Dawson College


2013
Bilingual Highschool Diploma
Enriched Program
Académie de Roberval









Sourced film clips (top to bottom) :
Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)
Le Prix de la Liberté (Jean-Pierre Dikongue-Pipa, 1978)
Aminata Sow Fall:  Romancière Sénégalaise (1987)