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Roller Skating While Black: An Embodied Archive

Roller Skating While Black: An Embodied Archive is my embodied archive of the roller-skating community in Columbus, Ohio. The project’s purpose was to provide terminology for specific skate styles and moves in Columbus and Black roller rinks around the country. Like anything that comes out of the African diaspora roller skating, the ephemeral nature of roller skating is about innovation and experience. Roller skating is less about naming but about having fun and finding your relationship to roller skating in respect to the people who have skated before you. For example, the grapevine is a skate move created out of Detroit, Michigan. The grapevine goes by other names like the “Matrix” or “Inverted V” (example linked below).

My project for this class will be a lecture-demonstration on the moves I have learned thus far in my ongoing research while roller skating in Columbus over the past year. I will talk through the movement mechanics and demonstrate the moves in real-time. My project has a video component where there will be short videos of me “performing” the various skate moves that I have learned while being a part of the Columbus roller skating community. The videos of the moves I have learned are archived on my website. This project involved me attending Columbus roller rinks for a year and ultimately immersing myself in the culture, having fun, and finding nuances and characteristics of roller skating’s joys. 

Grapevine