Steffani Jemison: on In Succession

Artist Steffani Jemison reflects on her fall 2024 residency for the latest iteration of an evolving set of video and live performance works. Her series, collectively titled In Succession, explores how we find the courage to be—physically, ethically, and collectively—the means toward ends that we may never ourselves get to see.

Across In Succession’s iterations, Jemison explores a range of scaffolded structures: sometimes sculpturally built to support performers in action, sometimes constructed with their very bodies, supporting each other. Shared weight and pressure create an exchange of physical and moral responsibility, an opportunity to absorb ideas from and find security in proximity to one another.

In her fall residency, Jemison turned to the medium of video to explore the potential afterlives of a 2024 performance that activated her most large-scale sculpture to date: a climbable scaffold structure. As in much of her work, in this developing iteration of In Succession, Jemison treats the camera as an extension of the moving body; the phenomena of perspective and perception operate as at once optical and embodied. The performers’ bodies and the camera are mutually implicated, and simultaneously influence the viewer’s experience.

As starting points for these bodily and material explorations, Jemison often seeks out the archival traces of historical events as they appear in journalistic accounts—with all their exaggerations, omissions, and idiosyncrasies of time and place. In this talk, Jemison shares her recent thinking on all these forms of porosity: how living, thinking, breathing human bodies absorb movements and ideas from each other.

In other words, how do we inspire (literally blow into, breathe in) and how are we inspired? Can we find freedom with rather than from one another? Where does the courage to seek possibility lie? To imagine beyond what we know?