RESEARCH




B/blackness is a speculative method
–ology of aliveness.


Black maternity is a sound –
you must tune into (it.)



My work centers ‘resonant abeyance’ as a conceptual and methodological ground—an atmospheric, sonic space where Black maternal memory reverberates despite institutional silencing.

What is possible when we listen from within 
the belly, the hold, the womb, the wound, the break? 
What happens when mourning becomes 
a method? How might Black maternal grief provide 
a vernacular archive, a temporal strategy, and a form 
of creative world-un/building? 

As mass death and racial violence persist as defining features of contemporary American life, particularly for Black and Indigenous communities, public rituals of mourning have emerged as potent social texts. While much attention has been given to spectacles of state-sanctioned brutality and the iconography of resistance, I theorized a different path: toward the intimate, interior practices of Black maternal figures whose mourning exceeds capture, refuses closure, and speaks back to the disavowal of their grief in dominant cultural logics.


A D R I E N N E  J A C O B S O N  O L I V E R

l e x i c o n

— Sankofic attunement


Expanding attunement to interior acoustic intervals in which the listener greets themselves according to spatio-temporal circumstances, one’s social geography, and sonic sensibilities as relating to doubt, belonging, and other matters of phenomenological self-conception; a primary act of Sankofa; an auditory hallucination and performance of reality augmentation as governed by perceived legacies; an antioppressive interrogation of settler ideology and listening positionalities through attentive materialization of unspoken and otherwise gagged ethnological brilliance; a performative gesture, somatic or spectral, of/toward the self through refractions of memory and other hauntings. See also: motherhood, sometimes.

— imperative aliveness


after Kevin Quashie, [Black Aliveness, or Poetics of Being] – indisputable, enduring; “the operating assumption…in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness” (Quashie, 7); worldmaking in the midst of witness, of Black being, in cosmological arc, in quotidian magnificence; beingness as aliveness as necessary Blackness as invocation as we-ness as non-reply as totality; deviation from anti-Blackness as center of thinking; Afrofuturistic logic/s and frameworks linking Black bodies and organic wild (trans*corporeality) generating irrefutable lineage and necessarily centering the Black matrilineal imagination (cc: Hortense J. Spillers, Alice Walker) and vernacular as expert in its breadth of conception, especially in object-demand; refusal of nonbeing; wayward opacity as process by which we surpass terror as “uninflected language” (Quashie, 16); a becoming.

— critical erotics

  1. after Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic” – a sensual, bodily, innately spiritual power; life force of perpetuation, of organic creative energy; that which is superficially encouraged and inferiorized; that which is consumed as suspect, as virtue, as lone worth, as commodifiable, shippable subjugation; particularly sensation endowed with feeling, anti-self-negation, the anti-pornographic: chaotic self, kink self as aspirational, safe self; examination/s of liberation through lens/es of interiority and full access to feeling such that demand is placed upon societal structures to uphold that revelry for our children and our children’s children; “a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered” (Lorde, 3); the bridge between spiritual and political; “the nurturer and nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge” (Lorde, 4); anti-patriarchal consciousness.
  2. after Fred Moten, [In the Break] –  a chosen subjectivity by objectified bodies in a system of degradation and oppression; a resistance on the part of the object, “the irreducible sound of necessarily vital performance(s) at the scene of objection/s” (Moten, 1); a locatable polarity to the casual, routine, familiar ‘terrible spectacles’ of Black suffering; a performance of refusal to participate in scenes of brutality; an invocation of objectification on part of Black ‘objects of knowledge,’ specifically those regenerating the Black object of knowledge.
  3. after Chan, [A Time Apart] – “time that saturates time,” the idea that “time can be fulfilled and made anew through a…rupture of some kind” (Chan, 53); an unmaking, “barely recognizable form, the discordant truth” (Chan, 54); a vitality, lethality, a vulnerability; mortality, and its homeland; an inhabitance of demise; an inevitability; “a desperate immanence” (Chan, 55); a seizure of rhythm, a percussive constancy; the unrestrained irreconcilable, a radiant abandonment; a joint made and unmade in breaking; anti-consolation, comfortlessness, a disappearance from which we go on.

WORK


p r a c t i c e - l e d  m e t h o d o l o g i e s

materials.

Words, the page, blankness, marks, rhythm. The rehearsal space, the crowded room, speculation. Mortality, compulsion, oration. Used garments, costumes, relics, found material, salt, indigo, fragments. Water, submersion, Atlantic grey whales, vinyl records, disco balls. Found things: sound, audio clips, textile. Conflict, transition, duration. Shoreline/s.

habits.

Stacking, compiling, grouping, labeling. Dis/association, daydreaming, sound bathing, editing. Consumption: serialized images (visual archives, films, mixed media), fragrance, recompositions; texts. Masquerading, “given circumstances,” voyeuristic observation. Inquiry, boredom as portal. Episodic organization.

traditions.

Black elegiac + theatrical: tonality, musicality, restraint. Afrofuturistic Southern Gothic Surrealism. Call + response, repetition, choral presence. ‘90s hip hop production design: sampling, rhythmics, references, cento. Meisner Technique: repetition, noticing, “always you as if the given circumstances.” Dramaturgical contextualization. 

s o u n d + p o e t r y






pre-order the limited release vinyl
..available 11/11



v i s u a l + p e r f o r m a t i v e


1. 
everything is everything (2023)
daughter’s gaze, mother’s movement, light, shadow.




2.
 Monument No. 1 (2023) [performance still]
aspiration, recall, repetition, prayer, haunt.




3. a now, now collaboration 
in the Blue Ridge Highlands of North Carolina
on god [performance cycle: 2021-22]
skin, rock, green, sweat, song, fat, rainfall

f i l m + v i d e o




1.
archive of treasured baggage (2024)
single-channel film installation, “Initiations,” Sonja Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
originally published: 2021, The Night Heron Barks


2.
practice (2024)
single-channel film installation, “Initiations,” Sonja Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill




3.
in praise of the ridiculous (2022)




4.Interview [Two] (2021)
daughter’s voice, mother’s voice


5.gallery (2010)

copyright © 2025 | Adrienne Oliver 
additional site photography
by Rachel Larsen Weaver
with studio views by José de Sancristobal.