2026 Theses Master's

All The Space You Cannot See

Payne, Jeary

All The Space You Cannot See is a film and companion piece about my mother, who is deceased. It is an attempt to see her face and hear her voice, through the shared and unheard remembrances of 5 of her sisters and her mother, my grandmother. This work also explores Epistemological location, as it relates to Black cultural practices of gathering, specifically in and around the Kitchen. This exploration observes the ways in which space and location coalesce to form containers for our memories— how these memories become site specific and tied to the personal geographies that make up the architecture/texture of a space. Anchored in a Black visual politic and Black feminist theory, it is gesture towards rendering a new composite image of my mother. This is a Black, oralgraphical-documentry, that draws upon Black Collective Memory, refusal, survivance, emotional architecture, sites of memory, faith, spirituality, grief, absence and love.