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Skeleton of Water
Photography, Sculpture
2023
Sc Bronze
61 × 46 x 41 cm
Mumok, Wien
© 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York Photo © mumok Museum,
Stiftung Ludwig
Wien
Project Description
In these images my sister and I perform a ritual of re-birth, using masks created from the skeletons of a resilient Sea-Fan coral to connect us to the oppressed histories and endangered ecosystems that we have grown from, and live within. The corals are a part of queer ecology, a colonial species made of multiple organisms, dissolving boundaries between gender, sexuality, and classification. As LGBTQIA+, we search for guidance from other queer, more-than-human bodies which may lead us into a different future. By wearing the masks, we inhabit an exoskeleton, looking from within the bones of another creature, gaining a more-than-human perspective.
We are from the island of Antigua and Barbuda, and come from a combination of Afro-Caribbean, European, and American ancestry. Containing within us both the embodied memory of the West African slaves and of the European Colonialists, we carry the legacies of the oppressor and the oppressed. We do not have defined ancestral traditions, and were raised on land wounded by genocide and slavery, seeking to heal, to discover, to invent new ways to bring us closer to the land and histories we have grown from.
The photographs are all shot on film and exposed multiple times, which I developed myself. Through these images I aim to emancipate our queer identities, the threatened coral species, and the violent histories contained in our ecosystems. By performing this ritual of re-birth, we are able to connect to our past and imagine a future of multi species interconnection.