Catherine Anyango Grünewald

“I don’t want to feel like it’s only me. I know it’s not only me, because there are others out there…” ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is a short visual essay film by artist animator, Jessica Ashman, about navigating the visual art and animation world as a black face in a white space. Using animation and recorded interviews of eight other women of colour artists, ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is an abstract confessional from the director herself: a visualisation of the joy, frustration, wishes and dreams of what it feels like to be a black women and a woman of colour artist, creating and existing.

Referencing Charcot and the visual classification of hysteria, the film is one in a series of documents exploring the physical manifestation of mental or intangible phenomena. Drawing is used to create an image, but also a subsurface due to the unpredictability of the lead on the paper grain.

Hand-drawn animated short reconstructing, frame by frame, a brief section of mobile phone footage of Michael Brown, who was murdered by police in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Brown's body lay on the hot pavement for four hours after being killed; the film is an attempt to make some meaning of that time. By drawing and redrawing the mobile phone footage, time is reinvested into the image, as an homage and to add value. The frames have been worked over and over, causing the paper to tear and to rupture, almost resembling burning, recalling the violent protests and fires that broke out after the murder, as well as historical lynching fires.

Hand-drawn animated short of a woman, confined to a wheelchair, struggling and ultimately failing to survive in war-torn Aleppo.