Atlanta Arts category interest

Living in this body has been like being attached to a delicate anchor. I’m constantly drifting yet stable inside this motion. In her book Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, Black feminist writer and activist M. Jacqui Alexander describes Mojuba as “an expansive memory refusing to be housed in any single place, bound by the limits of time, enclosed within the outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum. A refusal that takes its inheritance from the crossing.” I relate Alexander’s envisioning to the works Por ti, me doblo (2023) and Junto, te aplico (2024), from the series Acaba y empiezas tu, como la agua que brilla sin luz (It ends and starts with you, like water that shines without light). Acaba y empiezas tu is a multisite-specific installation also informed by The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations and Black and Native Studies by Tiffany King. I understand shoals as in-between spaces, constantly changing and unmappable, that correlate to how I experience life.

Por ti, me doblo is a conversation between me and Colombia, the land of my mother. It is a representation of the love between mother and child, spanning many different landscapes. She passed away when I was a teenager, so, much of our relationship feels speculative. I am the first generation born in this part of the Americas, along both matrilineal and patrilineal lines. What are these notions of home for me if I have always longed for some other place? I use leather as a stand-in for my flesh, the flesh of unknown ancestors, for the sacrifices made, for rebirth. The palms represent the South, the Caribbean, the Americas—familiar places in my memory, deep within my DNA. The bark alludes to the Northeast of the United States, specifically New York City, where I grew up. The charcoal, a reflection of resources given to us by the land; the copper, a way of incorporating the layered histories of photography and flesh. Copper was used in the early history of photography.

Junto, te aplico continues the conversation with my mother, grandmothers, aunts, and femme folx who have nurtured me with their hands. I took the same hides used in Por ti, me doblo and installed them in my bedroom five months before Junto, te aplico was installed inside a gallery. The hides developed evidence of our time together. Sun bleached trails of light onto their surface. I relied upon intuitive placement when the time came to install the work. I submit to the materials. Once in place, I rub repurposed vegetable and canola oil into the hides—oil that I previously fried fish, plantains, and cassava in. This action is a link to the lineage of women I come from—women from the coastal lands, whose expertise with such oil I now mirror.