Reading Group – Session 2: Listening to Images

Devika Chotoe introduces a text by Tina Campt that promotes listening to images to attune to quiet, quotidian practices of black refusal in identification photography. This method opens up radical interpretative possibilities for images and state archives, considering images not as sites of social reproduction, but rather as ruptures in the sovereign gaze of colonial regimes within which they were made. Campt attends to the infrasonic grammar of black futurity as well as the stasis and muscular tension visualised in these images that is not perceived through vision alone.