On the weight of Melan(oid)in

Historical impression: coffee, ink, and their inscriptive weight are the material foundation of @hallchase Melanoidin. Hortense Spillers on the body and flesh: the hieroglyphics of racialization—those engraved inscriptions that produce comprehension born out of the incomprehensible congealing of flesh.

Seeing this exhibition and Chase’s other show The Bathers, I recall Rinaldo Walcott’s essay "The Black Aquatic" where Walcott remembers Al Campanis in 1987 attributing the lack of black swimmers to black people’s lack of “buoyancy.” Blackness, then, sinks. In Melanoidin, that is all I could think of: the sinking, the sunkenness, of black(ness). The dark, “fleshy” bits ground the illusion of the negative (white) space as material. A reversal, one foundational to the logic system of race itself, plays out on the white paper.

There are many, many different languages and worlds embedded in this work—triangular blackness, |black| hieroglyphs, amalgams congealing (un/becoming), liquidity and buoyancy and liquidation and sinking, impressions-cum-compressions-cum-depressions, non/reality of (black) leisure in the wake of “trade” and “commerce,” the haunt of the buoyant body (…corpse)…the weight of melanin in the depths of the liquid(ated) world.

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