Genuine relationships are the origin and manifestation of my practice. Collaboration creates new ways of communicating– shared languages made up of words, images, and actions that form the foundations of collective liberation. Or, in the words of abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.”
I am an interdisciplinary artist, working with “other people” to create experiments in film, archives, installation, and performance. My ethos of collaboration took root in 2014, when I co-founded the multimedia performance collective Call Your Mom. The collective makes immersive works that invite audiences to connect their own experiences to larger social/political dynamics. As an archivist, I attempt to highlight the impact of relationships on collective memory. I ask participants to reflect on what other participants have shared; I make the intimacy of the process legible in the record. My current projects focus on relationships between individuals on the inside (prisons/jails) and the outside (the free world). I collaborate with incarcerated friends to make new media installations that reveal the mechanisms of the prison industrial complex.
In each of these spheres, I choose people first, knowing that interpersonal connections will clarify the rest of the process.