Sula Douglas Folkes

repertory as a model to sustain Black cultural materials through cyclic return

In this research, I introduce the repertory as a model to sustain Black cultural materials through cyclic return. Rather than renovating archival systems never designed to hold Black life. Black artistic culture resists archival logic through its fluidity, its refusal of stable categories and its tendency to leak across boundaries of genre, medium and discipline. Where archives demand fixed classifications and singular provenance, Black materials insist on motion, transformation and multiplicity.

Drawing on repertory theatre practices and Anne Bénichou's exhibition models, I refigure this theatrical infrastructure for Black cultural work. I distinguish my use of repertory from Diana Taylor's notion of the repertoire; I define it instead as both a collection and a performance.

Refusing the archival imperative to place works under 'house arrest', I insist that creative materials require the visibility of exhibition and the friction of performance to survive. Therefore, I construct a durational system where the collection functions not as a vault, but as a staging ground. I hold materials - what Carolyn Hamilton might call 'repertory forms', specifically to ready them for the 'acting out' of display, keeping them available to be replayed, transformed and set back into motion. I operate this system through registers of liveness and darkness, rotation and interval.

Yet, I ask, what logic can truly facilitate this cyclical, iterative and fugitive exchange? I argue that call and response is our most enduring onto-epistemological foundation, the structural mnemonic that organises Black life. To mobilise this, I develop critical antiphony as a curatorial methodology.

Through this project, I aim to design a living repertory from the unorganised materials of Tomorrow's Warriors, working at the intersection of Black critical and feminist theory, performance studies, visual culture and archival practice. I listen, conspire with and respond to previous inquiries in provenancial fabulation, curatorial dramaturgy and Black feminist infrastructure-building. By reclaiming exhibition not merely as display but as an act of preservation itself, I ask what infrastructures emerge when communities build systems that match how their knowledge actually moves.

Supervisors

• Dr Edgar Schmitz
• Barby Asante
• Dr Sonya Dyer