Untitled (Throw Out)
Conceived, written, and performed by Jill Casid and realized by Jack Kellogg
2017 – 2022, Color video with sound, RT 16:30
Casid’s film, Untitled (Throw Out), takes its title phrase and central animating vehicle from the handwritten instruction (“letters: throw out”) left by their great-aunt on an envelope containing the incomplete remnants of an effort to save their mother who had been deported to the Gurs concentration camp. A densely layered palimpsest of image and sound, the film weaves unstable photographs with archival shards while Casid’s voice and increasingly smudged, tracing hand spell out the envelope’s lettered surface and contents to speculate with the other side of spell. Following the envelope’s double-sided command to “throw out” as in discard and “throw out” as in to transmit, the film maps an approach from Gurs to Hart Island and its potter’s field as a way to draw the unmapped connections across the throw-away world and the differential ways in which we are made to live our dying on a dying planet in a situation of forced disposability Casid calls the Necrocene. The throw length of projection and visual and audio amplification of its instruction to throw out away confront to contest the conditions of being thrown by an activated melancholy that holds fast to and keeps company with the cast out in refusing to move on until there is justice and material reparation.
Exhibited in Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning, Oct. 1-Dec. 10, 2022, Ford Foundation Gallery, New York. Curated by Jessica A. Cooley and Ann M. Fox.
Audio and Text of Visual Description
The Brooklyn Rail’s NSE #701 | Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning, featuring Jill Casid, Pamela Sneed, Kevin Quiles Bonilla, in conversation with Ksenia M. Soboleva.
Watch here
Britt Stigler, “Contemplating ‘Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning’ at the Ford Foundation Gallery” (All Arts, December 8, 2022).
Exhibited in Insurgent Flows, curated by Anita Hofer and Eva Ursprung, Kultur in Graz (KiG) in collaboration with steirischerherbst ’23, Graz, Austria, September 20-October 15, 2023.