The Human Mixtape is a 112-minute durational sound work by interdisciplinary artist Kitty Ca$h, presented as a DJ mix, woven with excerpts from Christina Sharpe's 2022 lecture What Could a Vessel Be?, presented as part of the Meetings on Art program during the 59th Venice Biennale. Sharpe's voice moves through the mix as a guide, leading the Reserve, an evolving chorus of scholars, poets, musicians, organizers, and artists whose voices function as both archive and citation.
Within Energy Reserve Systems, Energy is lived experience. Reserve is what we carry forward. The System is the continual exchange through which one regenerates the other.
When Sharpe asks, "Is organizing a vessel?" the question unfolds in conversation with Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale, whose Tears of Joy speech is layered alongside Rick Ross's track of the same name, placing the archive and its afterlife in the same breath. Later, poet Sonia Sanchez's reflections on Black womanhood enter into conversation with Kitty Ca$h's own ongoing inquiry into the vessel, blending with the cosmic jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra before unfolding into her single "Can't Shut Us Down" from her debut EP, Handle With Care.
Spanning spiritual jazz, Latin soul, dub poetry, Detroit techno, Angolan semba, and deep house, the mix treats Black music as a technology of memory capable of carrying history, feeling, and knowledge across generations. Original Kitty Ca$h edits and unreleased productions from her forthcoming EP, Energy Reserve Systems, including "One Night" featuring Kilo Kish and Dua Selah, "People Power," and "AMEN," are threaded throughout. Roland Clark's "I Get Deep" recurs as a refrain across the work, continually returning the listener to its central inquiry.
The mix closes where it began, with Sharpe still asking, "What could a vessel be?"1
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