Aftermath

Balthazar Alfred

Choreography is not only how we move, but rather how we move about within the frame of being human. People at all times are confined and controlled by the powers of others around them; this project explores the visual aftermath of how people collectively but passively push back against those powers within public spaces and take something back for themselves. In Rizvana Bradley’s Essay Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion, she explains choreography to be the way in which people commonly express themselves in a society, factoring their individual identity, and how people use acts that go against the common choreography of their own politicized group; through this, people create a personal expression for themself. This photographic project visualizes the reverberations in the space left behind by this counter-choreography of movement and, further, how people use this movement to express their collective wants and to go against systems made for people other than themselves.

Through this passive counter-choreography, individuals can, somewhat anonymously, create space for themselves and create a collective freedom and form of true democratic action. The echoes of people who use the land are then put in stark contrast with the unnatural control of the ruling class, who are able to construct and shift the space around us while not requiring the space to live, and having the ability to completely remove themselves from the creation of space required to create and uphold society.

This series of images showcases a small slice of actions and reactions that people have within space that speak to a greater effort between anonymous members of the public to create a space that works for them, instead of one based on capital and profit.

About The Artist

Balthazar Alfred

Balthazar “Baz” Alfred is a photography-based artist based in Toronto, Ontario. Baz’s upbringing was split between time in the suburbs of his hometown of Winnipeg, where he had time to appreciate nature and downtown Toronto, as his mother worked in the film industry. But when he couldn't spend time in nature, he gained a great love for cities and urban centres. Baz’s photography presents everyday occurrences through an abstract lens, creating new methods of understanding how we look at the things we interact with daily. When combined with his eye for the sublime and ethereal, this abstract lens allows him to stay on the cutting edge of ideas in the world of photography.

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