In hoodoo tradition it is said that you can you can drive unwanted spirits from the home with clapping. I consider my examination of my white/black relationships an act of exorcism. Through the small mediated act of slapping white people in the face and recording the experience, I am attempting to externalize what it can feel like to be interacted with as a Black body; living with the constant possibility for both psychic and physical violence because of the impossibility to fully be seen under uninterrogated projections of otherness, deviance, and inferiority that are casually imposed onto our bodies. I am materializing the impact that the prevalence and repetition of the subtle everyday violence of white supremacy (microagressions, mammification, compulsory code-switching, the politics of politeness) can have on shaping one’s identity and relationships. And creating a visceral experience of embodied awareness for white participants to feel the impact that the subtle unexamined everyday violences they perpetrate can have on the psychic body of the other.
