Since the 1990s Jafa has kept a set of source volumes from which he cuts and collects, tracing histories and narratives of Black life that were never written down. This is that working archive turned into a book of its own: 839 pages of visual sequences cut and juxtaposed across the spreads, punctuated by commissioned texts and by the essays, short stories and poetry that have fed his practice. The question underneath it is the one his films keep asking, whether a static or moving picture can carry the power, beauty and alienation that Black music carries. Published for his Serpentine exhibition and its Berlin restaging.