Fugitive Freedom Dreaming (2024).

Fugitive Freedom Dreaming (2024) is a cinematic poem filmed at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé in St. Augustine Florida between 2022 and 2023.1 Also known as Fort Mosé, this territory was established in 1738 during the Spanish occupation. Guiding the reader through the film that structures the work offers a way to read the film as a means of claiming queerness as an integral component of Black liberation. The work is a counter narrative to the dominant perceptions of the Spanish Florida colonial period for which evidence of rebellion is more often than not erased, overlooked, minimized, and/or for all intents and purposes, made absent from Floridian collective memory. In this piece, I contextualize the historical context of the film, the visual and aural strategies employed in filmmaking, and the means by which the piece is a poetic intervention for celebrating the underrecognized histories of maroon cultures in the United States. From this praxis of spiritual and intellectual curiosity, I assert a queer Black aesthetic that opens up space for me as a Black artist living, surviving, and thriving in the midst of the contemporary reality of the settler colonial state of what is now called the United States of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]