THEY LAID DOWN THEIR HAMMERS AND CRIED

02023 


*Comissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago for the 2022-23 New Works Comission. Curated by Tara Aisha Willis.

*Performed at CURTIS R. PRIEM EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA AND
PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

THEY LAID DOWN THEIR HAMMERS AND CRIED is a Black cyberqueer installation-performance that reimagines the American folk legend John Henry with reference to Palmer Hayden’s painting of the same name. The work employs sculptures embedded with electronic triggers and sensors, which generate reactive audiovisual outputs in response to the physical labor of striking a sledgehammer. Each of the three hundred strikes activates sound, video, and archival recording processes, corresponding to 300 stanzas of a feminist reimagining of the Rifleman’s Creed, repurposed for a hammer instead of a firearm.

The system functions as a software of grief: a programmable environment in which grief can be enacted, recorded, replayed, and accumulated. In this framing, grief becomes both archive and algorithm, allowing the work to exist as a durational performance and as a repeatable, persistent system. This approach reflects a Black contemporary practice in which memory, endurance, and affect are encoded in technological infrastructures, connecting lived experience, labor, and archival practice.

The technical infrastructure emphasizes embodied causality: each hammer strike feeds directly into audiovisual processes, producing feedback loops of sound, light, and image. The work functions as both choreography and durational performance, where repetition, timing, and labor form a dance-like structure that is inseparable from the logic of the software. The system’s modularity ensures that the work functions in live performance, as a self-sustaining archival installation, or as a hybrid mode where recorded gestures continue to generate reactive audiovisual material over time.

Through this integration of Black cyberqueer practice, archival logic, and embodied computation, THEY LAID DOWN THEIR HAMMERS AND CRIED investigates how labor, grief, and endurance are encoded, transmitted, and replayed, proposing a Black contemporary framework for affective archives in which performance, software, and corporeal memory converge.

THEY LAID DOWN THEIR HAMMERS AND CRIED is part of the TOTALRESISTANCE() series.

CREW

STUDIO COORDINATOR
Camille G. Bacon

AV TECH / PRODUCTION 
Matthew Dienhart

SOUND DESIGNER / PRODUCTION
Anthony A. Dunn / Terran Wretch

HARDWARE / PRODUCTION
Molasses Industries
EMPAC R&D

PRODUCTION ADVISOR
Letitia S. Holloway