Back to the Future PT 1

Back to the Future PT 1

Reclaimed backpacks (from backpack exchange), photographs, led lights

found objects, cords, aluminum fence structure, digital image on screen

2022

Informed by Black fugitivity, the poetics of language, and Black musicality, Back to the Future Part 1 responds to cultural hegemony, race, and memory. Through the formal and conceptual use of education and everyday aesthetics, Donnett conducted a backpack exchange with local students at the Pine Camp Cultural Arts Center in Richmond, VA. The project utilized communication strategies, namely notions of exchange and encoded language, to question the visibility of power and time, as well as the intuitive or theoretical notion of blackness. Next to a large image, backpacks from a local student exchange flash in Morse code the following: the Love Supreme phrase from John Coltrane’s song “Acknowledgement,” an excerpt from James Baldwin’s essay “Uses of the Blues,” and the chorus from Richmond native D’Angelo’s song “Back to the Future.”

Top row: Photo courtesy of Nathaniel Donnett

Bottom row and last image: Photo courtesy of David Hale