“While blindfolded for most of his performance...Woods-Morrow transformed the spectators into collaborative participants by prompting us to interact with him– asking for someone to come up and perform a given task. I was curious about the takeaway from this performance, and he told me after the performance that he hoped the audience would leave with some type of appreciation for the pleasure they deserve...”
2024
‘I Believe in the Future of Small Countries’ for Performatorium 10, Installation | Performance, Regina SK (2024)
For their engagement with Queer City Cinema: International Film and Performance Arts Projects, Derrick Woods-Morrow presents ‘I Believe in the Future of ‘Small Countries’. Within the context of speculative worldbuilding the artist reconfigures the Gallery space as errogenous zone, inside and outside of time and space, myth and reality. Truncated by film elements, language exercises, and sound activations, the performance queries the coastline as place to commune with Queer spirits lost at sea. Seeing the coastline as a site of refusal, promiscuous behavior and subversion, the artist guides the audience to extend themselves beyond orgasm and instead release their pleasure into his body as a speculative excavation of collective labor. With Caribbean scholars Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Kamau Braithwaite in mind, Derrick’s new work pushes at the edges of “How sensation & desire” operate asynchronistically.
‘Maroon/z interface & archive (Prototype)’ (2024 - ongoing)
Maroon/z ignites the crossing of Black fugitive epistemologies, queer ecologies, and the spiritual blueprints of maroon communities, interrogating where the sacred and profane collide in acts of survival, resistance, and desire. It dances through digital realms—those infinite, flickering maroon colonies—where the internet becomes a haven, a loophole of retreat for queer descendants of enslaved ancestors, pulsing with connection, fugitivity, and unruly desire beyond physical and ideological borders. Maroon/z draws its breath from the maroon societies of history, those radical sanctuaries carved by the once-enslaved, and probes the spiritual and material crossings that sustain such audacious, liberatory acts of self-determination.
Queer and trans bodies stand boldly at the center of this inquiry, negotiating sacred belonging and profane dislocation—a charged, unending balancing act that births new worlds from fracture. This work begins to unfold through two Artist Research Studies (ARS). The first, a cohort known as the ‘Fugitive Futures Collective’ (FFC), commissions works from Devon Gray, Dom Dureseau, Rodell Warner, Roy Kinsey, and K Anderson. Their creations delve into maroon aesthetics, mapping the charged intersections of queerness, spirituality, and fugitivity while imagining speculative and performative dimensions of maroon histories. These worlds unfurl in a virtual constellation: a URL.Archive.Portal, hosted online as an interface for the Maroon/z project, a digital archive alive with re-worlding.
The second intervention brings Maroon/z into partnership with the CALUM Institute and the LGBTQIA+ Center in Marseille, a city steeped in the echoes of transatlantic trade and migration. Over a three-year journey, Maroon/z assembles a cohort of 18 LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers to craft an archive of their pleasure—a reclamation through collective rituals, site-specific interventions, and critical explorations of “queer currencies.” Marseille’s identity as one of the world’s largest port cities becomes an entry point, a resonant geography where the past’s violent crossings haunt the present’s queer migratory lives. Together, this cohort embarks on an excavation of how maroon-inspired spiritualities can amplify and sustain the futures of queer and trans migrants, tethering histories of enslavement to radical imaginings of joy, belonging, and resistance.
Integrating archival whispers, ethnographic fragments, and the electric hum of performance, Maroon/z reimagines the maroon not as a figure confined to the past but as a continuous presence—queer, fugitive, and irrepressibly world-making. Through these interventions, Maroon/z interrogates religion as both a contested domain of power and an untapped site of radical possibility. It invites us to consider how maroon spiritualities transform embodied critique into transcendent, liberatory potential—not just as survival, but as a refusal to be erased. This is not history recovered; it is history re-worlded, shimmering with the audacious promise of queer freedom yet to come.
scrying orb, 2024, in collaboration with Rodell Warner
