jaamil olawale kosoko and Ima Iduozee

A 2022 Slamdance Award winner for Best Experimental Short, Chameleon asserts the Black body’s ability to conjure environments of unexpected, dynamic, and emotional complexity. A performance film adaptation of a live work that never happened, the project explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness, gender fluidity, and queerness in contemporary America.

Composed of five choreo-poems, the film draws from the term “biomythography” coined by Audre Lorde to describe her 1982 novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which combines history, biography, and myth—and offers a model for narratives rooted in queer, Black, feminist imagination. Each of kosoko’s five autobiographical poems ("Linoleum,” “Stank,” “Entertainer,” “Wake,” and “Effigy”) act as distinct chapters, depicting and rewriting moments from the protagonist’s lived experience. Throughout the film, kosoko’s body responds to memory, moving in and out of dream states, nightmares, present practice, and ceremony. The process, a conjuring, allows past ghosts to exist alongside present reconfigurations, underscoring the creative, therapeutic, and painful—but sometimes necessary—impulses of fugitive beings to shapeshift in order to survive.

Chameleon (A Visual Album) features sound composition by Everett-Asis Saunders and original poems written by jaamil olawale kosoko. The work was made with the support of an Artist Residency Award in performing arts and is presented as part of the kosoko-curated interdisciplinary exhibition Portal For(e) the Ephemeral Passage. (HD video, 21:15 mins.) Click here for a complete lineup.