re: wind ally
2021
6 minutes, 2 seconds
last summer i happened to take a short walk with a bumblebee. it was a season in my city of explosive abolitionist activity. i began more deeply reckoning my comfort within carceral social norms, extractive ideology in my art making and how my training in white feminist-environmental discourse had a lineage of doing more to uphold systemic harms than toiling to undo them.
a first reaction, when a world of mine is breaking, is to grasp at anything that may keep it together. the bee was glue, a stroll down memory lane. in (un)order to form a praxis of dissent from my impulses, i carry a crowbar from writer kathryn yusoff to pry the narrative hermetic seal of a singular, true anthropocene, maps drawn by indigenous action so to avoid bright allies and a pen from artist kameelah janan rasheed so to out-strike the cop in my critique.
re: wind ally is the document of a performance. or it is a corrected record. either way it’s an act of walking back a story. somewhere, there’s a crime. but it is tracing correction out of the correctional. if it were an annotation, it would simply say: “i’m not so sure”.
performed on elm street in new haven, ct, usa on july 16th, 2020.