EMPAC Work in Progress: Space Carcasses

Space Carcasses is a dance-based, interdisciplinary performance I conceived and direct to explore how built environments imprint themselves on the body—how architectures become skins we’ve shed, yet still carry. Using emergent technologies, I’m constructing a virtual composite of three geographically and historically linked sites—Savannah, Georgia; Réunion Island; and Northern Nigeria—each a node in the transatlantic slave trade.

Through 3D scans, audiovisual residue, and movement scores developed on-site, I animate these “space carcasses” with the dancing body, drawing from an Africanist worldview where time is circular, identity is spiritual, and dance is a primary technology of access to ancestry and communal memory.

The body, in this work, extends into space as exoskeleton, as container—dancing with, through, and against the architecture it once endured. Projections, spatial audio, and live performance will interface in real time, forming a ritualized re-memory of place.

Space Carcasses is not only an inquiry into somatic histories but a process of re-contextualization—a way to assert presence, power, and transformation through the enduring vitality of movement.