BLK Plutoh

Maine-based multimedia artist-musician-DJ-producer Liz Rhaney leads a participatory multimedia journey in sound, lights, video, and spoken word. Rooted in Afrofuturism and inspired by the farthest point of our solar system, BLK Plutoh is the farthest point of Black imagination, exploring what blackness is, was, and can be.

From the artist:

As a Blerd (Black nerd), I live at the intersection of art and science. My interest is in the combined power of creativity and technology. Comic books with Storm from X-Men and celestial charts sit next to each other in my room. I found a poem called Pluto Shits on the Universe by Fatimah Asghar. It is written from the perspective of Pluto, a planet that:

…broke your solar system…I chaos like a motherfucker…Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.

Pluto proudly takes their position as the radical, the vanguard miles ahead of everyone else, the planet that made us rethink what a planet is. After reading the poem, a question lingered in my head:

What is Black culture on Pluto?

What if Black people decided to go to Pluto? How do we get there? What is our culture like there? What music do we make? What clothes do we fashion? What hairstyles do we rock? Will we look or sound different? What aspects of our culture will we take from Earth, and what will we decide to leave behind?

BLK Plutoh is part thought experiment and part performance. Like Pluto is the edge of our solar system, BLK Plutoh is the edge of Black imagination where Black creativity runs freely, and the past, present, and future exist in superposition. We travel to this edge so our imaginations can be boundless as we explore the central question.

The performance has three parts: In Takeoff, we collectively leave Earth and travel to the mental space of BLK Plutoh. We travel there through sound and vision, with videos that weave together mythological, Afrofuturist, and cultural references like a visual mixtape. In Landing, we share our ideas about the possibilities of Black culture on Pluto. In Return, we come back to Earth and start building a bridge between where we are now and what we imagined. It is not a neat ending, but a time when we wrestle with the so what of the thought experiment, the what do we do now?