#FreeBree as a ‘Relay of Witnessing’: Remediation, Crowdsourcing, and Activist Art

On June 27, 2015, ten days after the shootings that killed nine worshippers at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, including Senator Clementa C. Pinckney, artist-activist Bree Newsome engaged in direct action by climbing up to remove the Confederate flag that had continued to fly at full mast at the state capitol even as others were lowered in mourning. Images of Newsome’s actions, words, subsequent arraignment, and of the return of the flag up the pole 45 minutes later, were then—and continue to be—widely circulated through a variety of media modes, including TV news segments and a host of videos, photos, GIFS, memes, graphic fan art, and blog posts. This paper thinks through the role of remediation and crowdsourcing in distributing, archiving, and amplifying the impact Newsome’s project. Cognizant of the increasing corporate routinization of user-generated online responses to contemporary art, I propose that Newsome’s public-facing embodied performance illustrates that remediation and crowdsourcing can, nonetheless, be mobilized as powerfully critical and political modalities. To develop this argument, I draw, first, on the conceptualization of digital portraiture as a “cumulative, serial” genre (Walker Rettberg), reading Newsome’s direct-action performance-for-video as enacting Black feminist and radical philosophies and practices of resistance to anti-Black visual surveillance (Browne, Harney and Moten, Fleetwood) and as prompting followers/fans to extend the temporal and spatial reach of the intervention. Then, I will show the relevance of Pramrod Nayar’s concept of “radical graphics” for artistic-activist practices of remediation and crowdsourcing by analyzing the large online archive of drawings and memes portraying Newsome as a superhero: an alternative icon that makes it possible feel and remember history differently. Creatively co-constructed and widely re-circulated, Newsome’s Black female embodiment of courage, fugitivity, planning, faith, and persistence counters the dominant narration of the Charleston shootings, which has circulated ambiguously around the hateful motives and mental health of white shooter Dylan Roof, as well as the broader amnesiac and white supremacist post-slavery historical surround (Sharpe). Finally, I will theorize social media users/audiences as picking up “the relay of witnessing” (Chambers; cf. McNeill). Posts tagged #FreeBree echoed and amplified Newsome’s declaration that “I did it because I am free,” and thus followers/co-creators can be understood as sharing in the ongoing, concerted labour of what the artist has called “tearing hate from the sky.” Through this case study analysis, the paper will contribute significant insights into the complex relationship between digital technologies, on the one hand, and collective artistic practices of self-inscription and witnessing, on the other, in the Movement for Black Lives at a time when “the touch of the digital” (Hudson and Zimmermann), the racialized distribution of “digital labour” (Nakamura), and the logic of “distributed storage” (Van Dijck) constitute the new matrix of critical political art and activism.