Loophole of Retreat

Loophole of Retreat interweaves stories of Black resistance, both past and present, to question the terms of power, freedom, and liberation. The work takes its name from a chapter in Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. A writer, feminist, and abolitionist, Jacobs escaped servitude and sexual abuse by hiding in a crawlspace in her grandmother’s home for seven years. Simone Leigh draws upon this story of self-emancipation to explore Blackness as a site of radical refusal. The stacks of concrete breeze blocks form a penetrable, cell-like enclosure—a confine from which one can partially imagine a world and a future beyond. At the center, Leigh’s ceramic sculpture is joined together by tightly interlocking braids, suggesting an altar to Black female subjectivity and self-preservation.

The accompanying soundscape offers an aural history of Black collectivity and rebellion. Leigh was inspired by Debbie Africa, a Black liberationist and member of the anarcho-primitivist group MOVE. While serving a prison sentence in 1978, Africa gave birth in secret—otherwise, the guards would have immediately taken away her child—with the help of fellow incarcerated women who sang and made noises for two days to conceal the sounds of labor. To recognize this act, Leigh collaged two major events: the 1985 news coverage following a fatal bombing by Philadelphia police of a residential home inhabited by members of MOVE and their children; and recordings from a protest at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn during the 2019 polar vortex, when incarcerated men banged objects to call attention to the facility’s loss of power and heat. These stories of oppression and solidarity add another layer to the psychic and physical space of Leigh’s installation.