Origin

Origin (2021), explores belonging, alienation and amnesia… Using archival family footage depicting the struggles within black households- but also an underlying sense of community and resilience. The video reflects notions of otherness and the precarity of life in the African- American experience. The family recordings take place in 2005 and 2008 in a small Texan town and Los Angeles. There is footage of dilapidated houses in neglected black neighborhoods that have not changed very much in the last century. The racial divides and disparities are as steadfast as the attitudes. The video speaks to those who have been othered, and faced with haunting memories, while also aiming to narrate a sonic foretelling of the future.
Afro-surrealism is not about the future it’s about the actual lived experience of black people, but includes elements of the metaphysical or the mystical that are present within the culture. This is essentially the direction of my work
What intrigued me by this aesthetic is that the drive behind is based on a need to re-write inherited narrative of black inferiority. Many artist and writers have worked toward the remaking of the African-American narrative as a way of owning one’s own identity.