Body Prop is an avant-garde essay film and attack against the ontology of white imperialism. Made of mostly hand-processed super 8 film - the rejected pieces of film used in other pieces of The Numb Spiral. The piece, in five movements, takes on the subject of the Body as a prop, as a body politic, as a simulation, and as a necropolitical expense, creating a “Cadaver Decomposition Island” of discarded scraps of Super 8 and archival material reveal the shadow of US nihilism within the advanced stage of hyperreality.
Combining original manifestoes (in the style of Situationism) with excerpts of Jean Baudrillard’s A System of Objects, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and other treatises on phenomenological existentialism, Biblical passages from Genesis and Ecclesiastes, impeachment transcripts, Beloved by Toni Morrison, the speeches of Malcolm X, YouTube news archives, and dozens of other texts in conversation in a tumult of signs, oscillating in a trance between attempting to situate within and disassociate from the Body Prop. The cinema itself is a Body Prop - simultaneously full and devoid of feeling and sensory. Featuring an original score composed of Hip-Hop beats and experimental soundscapes created by director M Woods.
Influenced heavily by the work of Guy Debord, Marlon Riggs, Saul Levine, and Stan Brakhage, the movie is divided into five movements and first premiered as a short film at the prestigious Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2020.
M. Woods will also be presenting two new self-published works of analog photography and poetry at every tour stop, capping off the tour with an official book launch at the vital hub for independent publishing, Counterpath Press, in Denver, Colorado.
[Temporary] Custody
By Annmarie & M. Woods, 64 page full-color
In this heartbreaking collection of photography and poetry, M. Woods and their daughter, Annmarie, playfully explore the medium of polaroid photography. Their camera exposes the bittersweet ephemerality of “endless youth” and the persistence of trauma, capturing elusive and fleeting moments together. This temporal despair is punctuated by the buoyancy of childhood and the resonant pain of divorce.
The Abridged Oxoniae Photographae
By M. Woods, 64 page full-color.
In this abridged collection of experimental medium-format photography and poetry, The University of Oxford is rendered as an enigma, a never-ending puzzle of rusticated concrete and cobblestone, repeatedly re-resurrected as itself, in attempts to transcend its own physical presence and ascend to Holy Pleroma as a mythological ideal of a never-ending past whiteness. All of Academia and all pursuits of the unknown lead to despair, the rabbit holes of our curiosity, and the never-ending spiral of our own lack. The Oxoniae Photographae is an Imperial scab under which the intrinsic properties of violence hide within formal aesthetic boundaries, disguised as exoskeletal beauty while functioning as atrocity.
The DEATH SPIRAL TOUR 2025 is part of Woods’ continued resistance against the Trump administration, featuring radical films and post-screening discussions intended to activate an organized avant-garde against the regime.