cast pewter (buried granite, quartz, brick, and ceramic), laser printed booklet, wooden lectern.
Created for the Terrain Biennial, Chicagoland, 2021
I made us a paperweight; I am now on chapter 2 (fragments 2 – 5) is a series of reproductions of my mother’s marginalia in Frantz Fanon’s text The Wretched of the Earth: the handbook for the black revolution that is changing the shape of the world, specifically the chapter “Concerning Violence.” These little pools of hard metal hold faint traces of x marks, underlines, and hand-drawn brackets but none of the original writing. Each metal piece shows a fragment of the pages and is anchored into the yard with geologic material.
The work plays at the edge of what is known, communicates, and even holds communicability. The weights play with creating marginalia, which is to play at a boundary of a text, mind, materiality, ideology, or even bodily presence. Extracting marginalia in I made us a paperweight; highlights a maternal bind and reproductive structures of knowledge production, power, ownership, inheritance, and land. This work is an ongoing engagement with a study of impressions left by objects.
Thank you to Pam and Bart Eisfelder for their yard and hospitality.