Fam Jam is a performance by Dylan Spencer-Davidson and Joy Mariama Smith examining relationality beyond traditional constructs of “family.” The work was premiered in the Kantine at Sophiensaele, Berlin in December 2025 as part of Queer Family Album, where it took the form of a performance in three parts: a three-channel video installation projected onto textiles, a series of wearable T-shirt artworks, and a participatory line-dance with the audience.
A 17-minute video collages material from personal and public archives—56a Infoshop (London), the Feminist Library (London), and Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Buenos Aires) among others — grassroots, queer, feminist, and trans archives built through mutual aid and collective stewardship. The images depict a range of kinship constellations, working through the messiness of “family”—the protections it affords, the harms it enables, the lines it creates and how they might be redrawn. Starting from the premise of family abolition, the work moves through kinship, intimacy, and connection, attempting—and failing—to create a real-time, decolonial, anti-capitalist space for alternative forms of relation.
The soundtrack layers samples, field recordings, and original compositions—drawing on sources including “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” Lebanese lullaby “Yalla Tenam Reema”, and the piano riff from Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend”—tracing a sonic line through orphanhood, displacement, and the ongoing work of inventing kinship otherwise.
