ELEVEN POSTURES FEATURE FILM (EXCERPT)
COMMISSIONED BY THE 2021 BOREALIS FESTIVAL OF EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC, BERGEN, NORWAY
PRODUCED, DIRECTED AND EDITED BY MATT VOLLA
Eleven Postures is a new performance film featuring percussionist Marshall Trammell. Trammell’s research based practice draws on the quilt codes of the Underground Railroad, the name given to the network of secret routes and safe houses enslaved African Americans would use to escape the slavery and torture of the American South. Trammell uses these Quilt Codes, a series of simple block images that would have been woven into quilts hung outside houses, as the starting point to discuss representations of solidarity and resistance in communities today.
For this new film, commissioned by Borealis, he performs 11 new codes, devised by a community living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the legacy of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, a bloody uprising of indigenous people against Spanish colonisers, still resonates today. Formulating new drumming postures for each code, the film concludes with a new performance of Trammell reading the 11 codes as graphic score.
Trammell is an experimental archivist, percussionist, conductor, and composer. His aesthetics and activism are centered in social change interventions and generate new local and global ecologies that embrace improvisation as a collective, movement-building tool in the creation of post-capitalist imaginaries.