‘If our bones were turned to diamonds because of pressure, to just bury those bones as opposed to all of the other things you can do with diamond bones [...] is something I feel compelled to do’ - Arthur Jafa 

When a tangible location with minerals is blown up, it creates rubble amongst the valuable pieces. People are then sent down to mine for the diamonds; how do we find our value amongst the rubble? Diamond Bones: Mining the Catastrophe is a multimedia exploration through the Black Feminist lens of storytelling. Black Americans have a history of oral storytelling. This tradition was passed down from the Ashanti people before, during, and after being kidnapped and brought to America. There is no Blackness without grief, horror, and fear. This creative exploration strives to use dance, filmmaking, music, theater, and the written word to express the richness of storytelling in the artistic space. While studying Afro-futurism, I was inspired by artists like Arthur Jafa, Hortense Spillers, and Octavia Butler to create work that ‘mines the catastrophe.’ The performance piece will explore the artistic vehicles used to tell Black stories. There is no radicalization of the ontological construction of Blackness; the history is in all of us, and I feel compelled to create from that. The goal of this project is to create a collaborative community of artists who can work through their own grief to make a piece that mines their own catastrophe, to use our ‘diamond bones’ in the way they were intended to. As this piece comes to life, I hope to implore a workshop-style practice to create a narrative, non-linear performance piece that uses various artistic mediums to explore Black storytelling, to mine the catastrophe.