“We Have Colonized Potentiality” by Jordan Deal is an essay commissioned by PROTODISPATCH, a new digital publication featuring personal perspectives by artists addressing transcontinental concerns, filtered by where they are in the world. It was originally published by the international nonprofit Protocinema and appears here as part of a collaboration between Protocinema and Artnet News.

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Jordan Deal’s dispatch is a montage of film and poetry attending to what it means to put our bodies on the streets and to convene in private. While the poem reflects on histories and presents of white-dominated society and the potentials for mutual liberation, the film assembles found and personal videos of celebratory and resistance gatherings that were responses to the 2020 U.S. elections, asking pointed questions about who gathers, who watches, who is allowed to celebrate, whose histories are told, and whose are censored.

And then the Phantom spoke back (from the currents of PIT!)

it’s in our name.

the transversal sanctuary.

our temple to

a million worlds

it’s in our name.

our memories that 

soars, boundless

of the scarification

of the murder of 

our founders

it’s in our name

we have colonized potentiality

and have been erased with censorship. 

our names. we became sacrificial limbs to their gods when they took that from us. The erasure of our timeless knowledge. the enslavement of our timelessness vocality, our futures. 

The imperialist gods stripped us of the timelines we were in. And tries to actualize our erasure, but there’s power in our unlocked memory. Our bodies hold the key to the truth to humanity. 

There are many wars that aim to off balance our grasp on reality. That transcends through our dimensional landscapes as God took form before we even knew HIS name, even though The Great Mother of Life warned us as She still does, dismantling the very structures that kept Americanism alive amongst these seas. Only murder can be of consequence. And as we experience THAT death, it will happen on all levels. a disruption of our sense of self. our sense of potentiality. She’s teaching us to dream more than the limitations of Whiteness, and the ego-death it teaches us. The lessons on greed and purity. Nothing’s more pure, cause SHE can only be understood through the luminous turmoils of change. And Love has many forms. Purity can only be understood through the singular, a destination to an eternal Hell. Singularity ends there. And potentiality is the chance to dream anew and to grow the wings we imagine. 

our name. We live our lives as if our name is real. As if it guides us to a purpose that’ll change the course of your high-tail seas. That makes me gag! Stripped down body and bone in order to lose ourselves, when all you need to do is ask. 

However, It’s in our name. The world is in our name. Life, death, and humanity is in our name. And we can choose that fate for ourselves. Building a bridge to the Otherworlds where they await for our return. Who were our gods before the myths of white cloaks and palehounds? Black brown earthly cosmos. Dialectical beings pound down the words of ethos as dancing is breath and love is material. 

I’ll jog that memory of yours back through the hells of disposition and time, to a place where the garden isn’t just crisp but ugly, isnt just washed down with the cloaks of eternal fuckery, but instead with all the fucks we carry.

Its time to venture to the bellows of the deep sea, the igloo of void and blackness. No more can you run with fear from our lovely seers! Cause we’ll prepare you yet, for your rebirth will be revolutionary!