Corpo nero come corpo alieno. Love is the Message, the Message is Death di Arthur Jafa, Fata Morgana n. 49, 2024

Arthur Jafa (Tupelo, Mississippi, 1960), winner of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale, is an African-American artist and filmmaker, who has contributed to the global affirmation of a black audiovisual aesthetic based on the body and its sonic extensions. In particular, the artist identifies the specificity of black culture in what he defines as Black Visual Intonation, by constructing the audiovisual phrasing on the temporality of Afro-American music, which configures new possibilities for a black aesthetics based on the sounding body. Starting from these premises, the essay analyzes Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), which intersects the modes of the essay film with those of music video, where the black visual intonation works as a kinesthetic principle of emotional revival that supports the audio-tactile continuity (Iannotta, 2017) between the film and the spectator’s body.