Cauleen Smith: Mutualities

In Sojourner, a group of women walk in procession through sites including Dockweiler State Beach and Watts Towers in Los Angeles, carrying translucent orange banners—each emblazoned with part of a text by the jazz composer and spiritual leader Alice Coltrane, whose writings, along with those of Sojourner Truth, are spoken throughout the film. 

Watts Towers, a cluster of seventeen sculptural spires designed and built by Italian American ironworker Simon Rodia in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles between 1921 and 1954, features prominently. The towers served as powerful symbols of hope and regeneration after surviving the 1965 Watts Rebellion unscathed. Smith locates a similar spirit in assemblage artist Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, California, where the women end their procession and listen to a reading of the Black feminist Combahee River Collective manifesto.

These collective voices, echoed in contemporary footage of the Chicago-based activist coalition R3 (Resist. Reimagine. Rebuild.), fuse spirituality and activism into a potent articulation of self-realization and resistance.