Brutus, 2026

Brutus is a forthcoming film made of still images. 

Informed by the Greco-Roman association of the word, Brutus (also once meaning betrayal, heavy, dull, and to the historical civilisation of Troy) draws on my largely invisible relationship with my father, whose name is Troy. A bare-knuckle boxer and YouTube account holder who produces philosophical videos discussing the etymology of words, accounts of his childhood, Black boxing athletes, the principle of respect, and the incessant rebuttal of God and his alleged omniscient conspiring.  The work deals with questions of structural betrayal and negligence, psychosis, housing and work instability, who lives and who dies (meaning, who bears a closer proximity to death and who prospers within society), the spiritual elements and implications of where the body is buried, as well as sickness, specifically diabetes. 

The film uses medium format images compiled into slow visual sequences to think through the speculative experience of dying, not simply through the death of the body but through what Orlando Patterson calls “social death," where one dies through social abrogation. Sepia is used as a visual signifier referring to the molecular level of cellular movement through intergenerational death and being, alienation, and the mining of sugar spikes within the body and how society creates conditions to exhaust potential to medically confirmed sickness. Using performance to camera, documenting reoccurring meetings with Universal Credit, and detailing personal or witnessing psychotic events, the work puts into a visual language an ontological emaciation, a tiredness that cannot be redeemed or alleviated. 

The film is catalysed through what Frank B Wilderson III professes: “The Black does not speak the truth; the Black is the truth." Where the image as a mode discontinues the over-assumptive "weight" of words, regarding how language and therefore law both decide and identify cultural progression and one's place in the world. In Brutus, the image is used to contend with language's shortcomings. This also includes how amiss language functions in reifying or truly consecrating the conditions of reality; instead, the image and witnessing become the primary register in the measurement of ontological truth for the individual subject in opposition to judiciary and social systems.