Impediment is Information

JJJJJerome Ellis’s video Impediment is Information features what he calls “erasure poems,” made from historic documents relating to enslaved Black people said to have had speech impediments like his own. Ellis excerpts text from an eighteenth-century newsletter requesting a person’s recapture, overlaying the words with an original score and footage of the artists conducting ceremonies honoring his “ancestors’” journey to freedom in the Central Plains. Ellis’s intervention connects the present and possible past, and returns meaning and beauty to what was once a confined existence.