Acaba, y empiezas tu, como la agua que brilla sin luz, (It ends, and you start, like water that shines without light), is a multi sensory site-specific installation that helps visualize the language and fluidity of the shoal.
Video footage of water that spans from the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, and Wesserunsett Lake are in conversation with a made environment that has sculptures made from pieces of birch, palm, coconut fiber, sand, limestone, copper, leather and glass. They all come together to envelop the space. A deconstructed chair a stand-in for colonialist practices, for notions of power that are being devoured by the landscape. The It is a representation of time, of my hands working with the material, the decay, but yet the reinvented.
Inspired by community of artists and activists, to name a few, Kai Lumumba Barrows (Phantom of the Anthropocene shown at Project Row Houses 2021) and Deborah Jack (SHORE shown at P+B Gallery, 2021); as well as thinkers like Dr. Tiffany L. King (The Black Shoals), M. Jacqui Alexander (Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred), Katherine McKittick (Demonic Grounds), Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten (The Black Outdoors), I look to explore what it means to create fluid spaces that speak to the fluidity of Black life. By incorporating sound, video and a site-specific installation, I invite the viewer into the dimensionality of an ever-changing and un-mappable space.
Acaba, y empiezas tu, como la agua que brilla sin luz (It ends, and you start, like the water that shines without light) is a conversation with materials that hold weight within my life whether that be through childhood familiarity, an ancestral connection or through an interrogation into what evidences and erasures are left within different spaces. What are the foundations for understanding time within space as a descendant of the African diaspora? Through the use of interdisciplinary interventions I am able to ritualize, give back and accommodate experiences of relate to an ever-changing past, present and future.
