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liquid blackness founder Alessandra Raengo talks with filmmaker and installation artist John Akomfrah about the emergence of the trope of liquidity in his work, in the context of the reversibility between aesthetics, practice, and praxis exhibited since his output with the Black Audio Film Collective, and about the intellectual errantry of his practice ever since. Together they explore liquidity as a feature of double consciousness, a way to comprehend the dispersion of the polyrhythmic, and a key to approach the aesthetic philosophy of collective praxis.

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his issue marks the beginning of an exciting intellectual partnership with Duke University Press and is the first of three foundational issues on the themes "liquidity," "blackness," and "aesthetics." These are also the building blocks of the concept, practice, and praxis of liquid blackness since the beginning of the research group at Georgia State University in 2013, as discussed in Alessandra Raengo's introduction. We now reexamine them in a much larger forum.The invited contributions featured here range in style, genre, mode, and length and reflect on the meaning of black liquidity and the conceptual possibilities and shortcomings of liquidity itself. We conceive of each journal issue as a musical ensemble, an "atonal symphony," in the words of John Akomfrah, whose interview concludes the present one and whose work graces our cover. Thus the issue's content is not divided by genre but rather by tone and pace. The main section -"Studies in Black" -assembles various modes of black study; "Critical Art Encounters" offers sustained and at times meditative engagements with contemporary artworks; the section called "Accent Marks" indicates shifts that emphasize possible lines of flight; "In Conversation" features a dialogue with practitioners or theorists. The art, writing, and conversation in this issue demonstrate the continuity between these scholarly modes as our contributors explore the concept of "liquidity" through the lens of capital, diaspora, the environment, materiality, movement, and sound. Our aim is to sustain this dialiquid blackness ■ ■ 5:1 ■ ■

Tasked with the mandate to “set the record straight” about the beginning of the liquid blackness research group and journal and to explicate the theoretical and conceptual parameters of the idea of black liquidity, this introduction negotiates the irreconcilable tension between keeping record and record keeping as a way to maintain the anaoriginarity of black study as an ensemblic and jurisgenerative practice. To do so, it draws inspiration from one of its objects of study, Larry Clark's 1977 cult film Passing Through, and specifically from the way the film's formal structure and historical existence as a withdrawing object mirror the elusiveness of the album that the musicians it depicts were never able to record. This introduction is divided into “tracks” to reproduce the same withdrawing effect, trigger a similar ensemblic gathering, and in the process, honor the object-oriented and immanent methodology developed by the liquid blackness project.