
Bezel is the digital companion to my five published works: I Don't Like the Blues (2020), We Travel (2020), We Dance (2021), Ghosts of Segregation (2024), and We Travel (2026). Explore Capsules to learn more about the project, and Credits for a list of collaborators, media coverage, talks, and more.

Southern Foodways Alliance, 2020
We Travel
The film We Travel chronicles the southern tradition of hog killing, framing it as a futuristic Black survival practice, "time traveling" across generations, its technology taking on the shape of the times. It is based on oral history and archival work with residents of Lee County, MS.

We Travel
A Film by B. Brian Foster & Ethan Payne
Short Film - Oral History, Narrative
2020
How we got here?
We Travel is based on two months of oral history and archival work with three families in Lee County, MS. The film has four chapters, each rendered as a note from a different person and a different generation. The recipient of the collection of notes is unnamed, save the sole mention of “you,” which comes at the end. The film began as/like the essay “How We Got Here”:
How we got here? We travel. Under no day and cotton in the back of a freight wagon, no different from the tree wood.
Pap come first, took his hands but left the gun, said why he needed it ran out.
From there, we move, from the seventh generation to me, from taste to touch, from the early morning of kill day to the cracklins. It was written and filmed in the spirit of afrofuturism, but a Black South way.
In the 1994 essay "Black to the Future," writer Mark Dery poses a question:
“Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” [180]
The last note is from me. In it, I answers Dery's question with a question: how do we imagine ourselves?
Kill Day (1994)
Five Photos, Three Generations, One Generational Survival Practice
We Travel began with the captured and kept memories of my grandmother, who had a small collection of photos showing several of the men in my family working through a "kill day" in 1994.
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Explore more Capsules.
See Credits for information on collaborators, media coverage, and derivate works (e.g., essays, keynotes) related to Ghosts of Segregation.






