Dispatch: Krista Franklin
Krista Franklin is the inaugural author in our Dispatch series from writers across North America. Written by a slate of artists whose works cross boundaries of genre and language, these posts address not only the immediate present but also a sense of place. Over the next two years, the blog will feature additional missives by Franklin, Gabriela Jauregui, Poupeh Missaghi, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson that meditate on the here and now.
With feet firmly planted in both the art and poetry worlds, Franklin has developed a singular interdisciplinary practice. Time often melds in her work as it simultaneously looks to the future and the past in its commentary on the present. Deploying her collage sensibilities into a two-dimensional, web-based presentation, “On Time” is a series of reflections on the fleeting and eerie ways that systems of time unfold and refold upon themselves during the pandemic and beyond.
—Kamilah N. Foreman, Director of Publications, Dia Art Foundation
On Time
Krista Franklin
October 12–December 7, 2020
Man, I guess if I was ever lucky it was one time.
Then I went missing looking for the sublime
- Black Thought in The Roots’ “One Time” (2011)
What I’m thinking about: What’s going on with time? What’s happening with time?
Clattering through the wreckage of the golden thread of memory, like slipping down the stairs. A catalogue of violations, a whole mess of tictoks shoved to the back of a closet rear the closet is of your mind.
10.23.20
One of my fondest recurring fantasies is burning all my journals. Watching the flames dance in a firepit glowing from the kindling of my memories.
I enjoy the shock of this confession and my glee flash on my therapist’s neutral expression, every journal I’ve ever written transmuted to ash.
Me: I took an entire composition notebook from 20xx and fed chunks into the metal teeth of the shredder until every bluebaby line was in ribbons.
Therapist: And how did that make you feel?
Me:
Hello Maria
Image courtesy Krista Franklin
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For the Complete Emersion Experience (CEE), I spend every minute of the pandemic in an altered state. Time, in these dimensions, is unmoored, loses its stranglehold. Three hours masquerade as fifteen minutes. Afternoons are little more than nocturnal daylight. Night becomes a full workday. Unlike my fellow citizens, I have no problem sleeping through any of it. I’m a card-carrying member of slipping into Mr. Sandman’s hatch, the most perfect disappearing act. To slide through the blackdoor of consciousness, to hide in the dark.
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Do you remember at night, at the beginning, how noisy the birds were? I used to imagine them astounded at us, indoors, the whole environment stilled by our going in, their night songs another language, the trees full of gossip. Even their clocks seemed off. Four am chatterbox cuckoos. Full songbird middle-night serenades just as you drift back to sleep. (Did birds always sing at this hour? Was night always too noisy to notice?)
For weeks I watch a cross-section of my social media network purchase portions of the outdoors for indoors. In an attempt to feel a part of something real, I join the Group™, [heart emoji] the photos, and also purchase pieces of outdoors for indoors. For a period of time that entertains me. Every day becomes an occasion. I order exotic bouquet surprise deliveries for weeks until my bank account bleeds petals. One night I charge my crystals under a thunderous full moon and capture rainwater I keep trapped in a mason jar for a month. There are days I crave the scent of cedar.
Photo: Krista Franklin
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10.25.20
Partial Inventory of Books I’m Currently Sleeping With:
The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles
Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata
Little Kings by Peter Kahn
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, Vol. 1, compiled and edited by Rasheedah Phillips
Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States, edited by Ron Sakolsky
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At 12:54 pm on 10.25.20, I inexplicably spontaneously belt out the chorus to Cher’s 1989 hit “If I Could Turn Back Time.” I am uncertain if this glitch is a memory and a message.
Hours, days, or weeks later—I can no longer measure time—the music-loving twins I follow on YouTube share it.
Image courtesy Krista Franklin
10.29.20
Colored People’s Time (CPT): A conception of time; an internal clock system comprised of tropicalia, easy skankin’, and gowiththeflow. Unique to those of melanated persuasions, CPT does not conform to Western notions of time, which are uncompromising, inflexible, and contingent on handcuffing oneself to the hands of a clock to be dragged around in eight-hour increments. To the contrary, CPT is a dynamic network of minute slippages, a series of imperceptible and elaborate evasions of the overseer-I, schedule-yourself-to-death tyranny of the White Man’s Clock™. CPT regards all clocks as mere suggestions and hypothetical aspirations. Indicative of those melanated individuals with a proclivity toward fugitivity, contrarianism, curiosity, counterproductivity, procrastination, laissez-faire, and small traces of don’tgiveafucktivity, CPT with its unstable and unpredictable nature destabilizes concrete factors that would support early detection. In fact, “early” is not a concept within the temporal frameworks of CPT. It’s an impossibility. Although researchers squabble over region and dates, CPT is long-rumored to have origins in Ancient Africa©, however, its permutations and iterations are, at this point, global. Rooted in both corporeality and intuitivism, this contested sense of time can swallow up to twelve hours whole and has been known to drive parents, friends, teachers, partners, employers, aunties, uncles, cousins and nem stark raving mad. It can be argued that those in rigid relationships with Western twelve-hour-clock-based understandings of time frequently find themselves completely undone on encountering a practitioner of CPT. Typical responses (taken straight from the Imperialist Playbook) are to discredit the offending CPT practitioner’s a) professionalism b) intelligence c) character d) ability e) culture; and to f) vehemently argue for the “respect” of (one’s) Time, Our Ever-Present Dictator of Days. Despite repeated attempts by the Imperial Fleet(s) to stamp it out, CPT remains a persistent alternative that possesses infinite possibilities for liberation innovations within its boundary-less framework.
See also: time warps, African Standard Time (AST), slippage, improvisation, Jazz, wormholes, Diaspora, Drapetomania, Divine Timing, ruptures
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From “Constructing a Theory & Practice of Black Quantum Futurism: Part One” by Rasheedah Phillips, Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, Volume 1. Photo: Krista Franklin
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On Time Travel
I. Mind Map
up to speed
vibration
response
energy
intuition
mathematics
entropy
sequence
portal
wormhole
pattern
event
destination
II. Games of Chance
Portals of possibilities, potential destinations. Photo: Krista Franklin
III. Sir Nose, Also a Vehicle
Scent is one of the most potent time machines. A trace of peppermint can pull you waist-first onto the lap of God, your grandmother’s fingers unwrapping a sweet buried at the black bottom of her bag, a burst of cool dissolves on your tongue. Here, and right back there.
IV. It’s Just a Matter of Time
As is music. One could hear the opening chords of a Temptations track and be transported to their mama’s kitchen, ten again, fingers clutching a mop handle, head in a cloud of Saturday.
V. Always and Forever
Memories are capsules, not machines. They’re destination points, events, containers, things we bury in the backyard. Little tents we pitch in our forests of imagination.
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11.6.20
A little-known fact about children is that they’re vampires. Their thirst, however, is not of blood but of time. They feast on seconds and bleed hours dry. They eat sleep. Their particular brand of vampirism has been allowed to go on for centuries due to their adorable and charming visages on arrival. Only someone absolutely void of a soul could resist something so small, dimpled, and vulnerable. In TV witchcraft there exists a spell called Glamour. (Not to be confused with, but abstractly connected to the glamour of TV vampires and of advertising.) Babies are nature’s ultimate glamour, pure preciousness, chubby with potential, serving innocence for filth. It’s not until you’ve taken them across the threshold that you realize they are something else altogether and you cannot return them. By then, they’ve already transformed you into their own private Renfield, hunched over and mad, mumbling, Master. . . in the dark corner of their boudoir while they drain whatever youth that remained. I’ve watched this craft with my own eyes. The Spell of the Bio Clock.
Still from Blade (1998). Photo: Krista Franklin
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Photo: Krista Franklin
Night(time)
The texture of stillness, everything soft-shrouded. Depending on your location, void of light, except dying embers above your head gasping a last glow from outer space, the sky, another graveyard. Or, the sound of wailing sirens far away, in the distance. That bloodblack quality—night, womb of mother nature—in utero, muffled. Still, everyone sleeps except creatures of the—nocturnes, busy, in shadow, or just to the right of streetlights, sometimes you have to look under beds, or
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What Year Is This?
1620 1972 2012
1919 1929 1968
1938 2015
2020
1965 1918
1940 1882
1922
1955
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12.7.20
On Spiritual Time
Do you know a hummingbird’s wings are nearly always in perpetual motion? How fast they flutter, an iridescent blur at their backs. If we’re talking god years, one beat of their wings is a century. How do you clock eternity? What is a year unearthed?
Krista Franklin was born in Xenia, Ohio, in 1970. A writer and visual artist, Franklin works in a variety of media, including collage, installation, altered bookmaking, poetry, and performance. Her practice excavates and layers material from Black popular culture, African diasporic histories, poetics, and surrealism, subverting narratives historically inscribed on women and people of color and offering radical visions in their stead. Franklin’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions including Recto/Verso at Sonnenschein Gallery, Lake Forest, Illinois (2019); . . . to take root among the stars. at the Poetry Foundation, Chicago (2018); and Quest for the Marvelous at the Chicago Cultural Center (2016). Her collection of poetry and art, Too Much Midnight, was published by Haymarket Books in April 2020. She is also the author of Under the Knife, an artist book published by Candor Arts in 2018. Her art and writing have also appeared in Black Camera, BOMB Magazine, Callaloo, Copper Nickel, and Poetry. Franklin lives in Chicago.
