The primary focus of my research is to investigate and explore melancholia in diaspora using decolonial methods and a return to ancestral knowledge and practices. Through objects and memories that are both intimate and estranged, I wish to consider the effects of assimilation and fragmentation that migrant experiences hold. Using interdisciplinary artistic practices that mix realities and center performative film, oil paintings, installations, embroidery, digital collage, poetry and short stories, my work is a play on expectations and translations of racialized and migrant bodies. I aim to empower racialized bodies through ritual while celebrating symbols of beauty like the brown skin and the black braid that have been undermined by colonialism, wielding ancestral knowledges as a way of offering, of healing, and of sharing. My work makes note of oppressive structures and attempts to undo colonial damage by creating decolonized safe spaces of healing while privileging the examination of diaspora through multiple, diverse, and intersubjective lenses.
My thesis exhibition is a space that blatantly celebrates the differences in media and interdisciplinarity to “disrupt” the white cube through decoration while evoking a sense of feeling “at home” to honor the mother, the motherland, the mother tongue and rituals lost to the onslaught of overwhelming eurocentrism and patriarchal colonialism.