Space Race: Cauleen Smith’s Cinematic Errantry

This paper discusses the practice of contemporary artist Cauleen Smith as an ongoing exploration of the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinematic space, place, and movement. Drawing upon a range of critical frameworks from cultural geography and Black feminism, it locates in Smith’s work an aesthetics and politics of errantry that favors radically nonnormative forms of relation and mobility. Borrowing the term from Martinican novelist and critic Édouard Glissant, and drawing more broadly from his thoroughgoing elucidations of the spatial dynamics of colonialism, the plantation system, and their afterlives, the text frames Smith’s cinematic errantry both as a formal and technological operation and as a political one grounded in a Black feminist praxis of place.