Annexation Tango

Directed by Kandis Williams

Annexation Tango was produced as a site-responsive commission for the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. The video’s backdrops feature fields that were formerly those of the Lorton Reformatory and the Virginia State Prison Farm, two facilities where incarcerated people were made to work as a condition of their sentences. Aerial footage of prison facilities, plantation-style homes, open fields, and pastures superimposed with a dancer performing a tango for one provide an uncanny convergence of past and present architectures of oppression.