Levester Williams
“Radical Radians of Refuse is a HD video of on-site performances that aurally and cinematically foreground embodied agency through the mediation of the black queer body and its somatic exchanges with the recycling center, a site of refuse. Assembled from material found in waste piles, sound-based sculptures become reservoirs of sounds and, thus, sites of possibilities as a black queer performer engages with each through a variety of movements. On-screen text seduces cross-breeding of the senses through each other. A rumble swallowed; a leg chutes out; a breast of bees swarms; chimes rhyme; hip strangles; through these bodily posturing and aural
happenings, the black and queer body becomes an interstitial threshold for movement, language, site/sight, and sound. Radians of refuse resound through the theatre of the body: black, queer, and whole.
”
Levester Williams assembled materials from the waste piles to create an installation of sound-based sculptures, formed as sites of possibility to be activated by the movements of an improvisational dancer. The centerpiece of the installation was an enormous wind chime made from electrical conduit and suspended from an industrial wire spool held 20ft in the air by an excavator. A bowling ball center-weight was used to ring the various lengths of metal tubing. The performance, which had no on-site audience, was captured in HD video for Williams’ piece Radical Radians of Refuse. This project was developed to “foreground embodied agency through the mediation of the black queer body and its somatic exchanges with the recycling center, a site of refuse.”
