FRED MOTEN

2 January 2013

I am writing, with great pleasure and enthusiasm, to urge your support for the immense, beautiful and fruitful project in which photographer and filmmaker Martine Barrat has been engaged in over the past four decades. Patiently and carefully, with great love and devotion, Barrat has been documenting the richly aesthetic social life of Harlem and the South Bronx. With the kind of inventiveness that only accompanies the sharpest and clearest of eyes, she works the edge where documentation and experimentation converge. She studies a mode of existence that is, itself, studiously inventive, rigorously intellectual and artistically innovative. It takes a very specific kind of genius to continually find what Barrat finds. The fact that so many overlook what Barratt so reverently both notices and inhabits- driven by the long running abandonment, condescension and disavowal that structure the art world's official attitude towards the lives of working people of color makes her achievement all the more remarkable and, even, heroic. With great feeling that has been stringently separated from the most minute trace of sentimentality, Barrat persistently uncovers the fact that another world is not only possible but already present on the outskirts and even underneath the organized unsustainability of American society. In social clubs and house parties, on basketball courts and around chess tables, the alternative is lived, under duress and constraint, in constant motion. The great technical achievement of Barrat's photography is that she preserves, rather than captures or arrests, this motion. Her work fairly resounds with motion and, in so doing, it is as if it not only becomes audible but also constitutes a field whose profound dimensions the viewer can enter. In short, Martine Barrat's work allows me to learn and discover something about the kind of black urban space within which I was raised and which I now can claim ever more intensely precisely because I had never fully sounded its depths. In teaching me more about what I thought I already knew, in allowing me to recognize what is new and unfamiliar in what is most my own, Barrat has given me, through her art, a great gift. I write this note in gratitude as well as in the hope that she will begin to receive the generous support that she so richly deserves.