about the work

Queen Mother Moore At Greenhaven Federal Prison, 2007
Rozalinda Borcila, Sarah Lewison and Julie Wyman comprise the artist-activist group BLW, which explores the rich and messy territory between historical context and contemporary reinterpretation of politically powerful texts. The group memorizes and re-speaks recorded texts from radical media to audiences vastly different from their originals. Conceived as a live performance rather than a video piece, Queen Mother Moore At Greenhaven Federal Prison experiments with the discomfort and awkwardness of trying on someone else’s words and explores the potential of this act to channel empowerment and to conjure inspiration and motivation for speaking about powerlessness and voicelessness. Queen Mother (Audley) Moore was an African American civil rights leader and a black nationalist. Her 1973 appearance at Greenhaven Federal Prison was sponsored by Think Tank, a community group organized to address the relationship between conditions in the black communities and high rates of incarceration. BLW’s redelivery of Queen Mother Moore’s words potentially could be interpreted as an act of theft or colonization—or could it, in the group’s words, “point to the remaining Sisyphean tasks at hand, the unresolved issues, and lead toward the production of new possibilities of interlocution?”