Black Bell: A Quartet for the End of Time

A presentation from 2023–2024 Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow Alison C. Rollins

At Radcliffe, Rollins is completing her second poetry collection, titled “Black Bell,” and a nonfiction essay collection of biomythology, titled “Outdoors.” She will also develop a series of performance art pieces in conversation with Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and historical examples of Black fugitivity such as Henry Box Brown and Lear Green, figures who, hidden in crates, shipped themselves from slaveholding states to free states. Thinking through frequencies of freedom and sounds of survival, Rollins will construct “soundsuits,” or body armor, to meditate on the landscape of the Black body as both invisible and exposed, inside and outdoors.

Free and open to the public. Registration is required and opens soon.