The Boat, The Water, and Open Mouths:
Histories Held in the Atlantic
A series of wall hangings created that reflect the desire to capture the physicality of the lives and histories of those over one million souls lost during the Middle Passage held in the Atlantic Ocean.
Black Oceanic Breath:
Healing Through Submerged Somatic Monumentality
Black Oceanic Breath is a performance art project that takes shape within the liquidity of the Atlantic Ocean at known sites of shipwrecks from vessels that carried enslaved Africans through the Middle Passage. Centered on the Black body as the site for physiological registers of transgenerational trauma and healing, this project explores the potentiality of submerged breath as ecological communion with the ocean (experienced here as kin, ancestor and guide) that reckons with the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives.
Here the act of breathing underwater – as communion – takes on transcorporal potentiality, as the body physiologically adjusts to the weight of the ocean to maintain life while simultaneously experiencing weightlessness. Black Oceanic Breath centers on the idea that within the experience of weightlessness exist the radical potentiality for Black people to breathe as we remember, grieve, and heal from the impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives.
Performance art as ecological communion at submerged sites of Black trauma, declares Black livability and futurity through breath. Through scuba technologies, this project documents my communion with the Atlantic Ocean as I breathe through/with the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Black Oceanic Breath is the performance of communion captured through video and audio recordings of submerged breath meditations, as well as through the creation of intuitive writing prose and drawings birthed underwater.