In A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Bantam, 1998), theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking defines a black hole as the set of cosmological events from which it is not possible to escape to a large distance. Furthermore, the edge of a black hole, the event horizon, is comprised of the four-dimensional space-time light rays that forever hover on this edge yet fail to get away. Hawking explains, “It is a bit like running way from the police and just managing to keep one step ahead but not being able to get clear away!” At the present planetary reckoning of Black, brown, and Indigenous people of color with the forces of systemic oppression, Hawking’s description takes on particular resonance. Enacting feminist theorist Tina Campt’s concept of “practicing refusal,” Black Holes Ain’s So Black uses juxtaposition and collage of archival images, film, video, and simultaneous performance to enact the spatial praxes of liberation of historic and contemporary Black life and architecture.

Thuto Durkac-Somo is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. He currently works at Pratt Institute Libraries as AV technician. He previously served as AV coordinator at the Museum of Arts and Design. Durkac-Somo completed his master’s degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Much of his writing concerns architecture, art, and technology’s ways of seeing. His films have investigated architecture and race. Durkac-Somo has published articles through the Canadian Centre for Architecture, The Avery Review, Take Shape magazine, and Real Life magazine. In 2022, he was selected as one of the participants in the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Emerging Curator Residency Program. In 2019, Durkac-Somo was accepted into the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, led by Meleko Mokgosi, Avi Alpert, and Anthea Behm. During the summer of 2019, Durkac-Somo participated in IMPAKT's Full Spectrum Curatorship.

Jonathan González is a choreographer and scholar working across durational and evening length work at the intersections of performance and dance, sound, video art, and dance for camera, as well as writing criticism, poetry, and prose. Engaging with how the historical passage of geographies and communities are entangled is at the heart of Gonzalez’s practice. He considers the act of making and sharing performance, of gathering together, as an opportunity for casts and audiences to experience moments of beauty, and experiments in collective action. González’s pedagogical interventions take form through curated platforms for teaching, lectures, and publications. He presented his project Spectral Dances at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2024), and his first book, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse (2025).

Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and director of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. His work crosses the thresholds between the design of architecture and the built environment, writing, research, and performance. Gooden’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy; Architekturmuseum der TU Mūnchen; Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (formerly the Netherlands Architecture Institute). Gooden’s multimedia installation work entitled The Refusal of Space was featured in the Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 2021. Gooden is also a professor of practice at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University where he is the director of the master’s of architecture program and codirector of the Global Africa Lab (GAL). Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016) as well as numerous essays and articles on architecture, art, and cultural production.