ANCESTOR
In Summer of 2021, I woke up with a sore back. Within three hours, I was writhing on the floor in a sort of pain I’d never before experienced.
Ancestor, began as an attempt to locate the origin acute pain that emergency doctors diagnosed as “back twinge,” and became chronic pain that lasted 10 months and later included symptoms of rashes across my body.
Hoping that an understanding of human anatomy would offer relief, I had the honor of studying human anatomy in a cadaver lab with Dr. Otto Sanchez in the Department of Kinesiology at University of Minnesota.
Though I got a glimpse into the inner connections of my body, I was no closer to understanding where the pain was coming from.
Simultaneously, I sought the support of physical therapists and acupuncturist who encouraged movement. Slowly as my range of motion returned I studied contact improv dance with HIJACK in the Department of Dance.
In May 2022, I began to sew a body as a way of synthesizing my experience, an attempt to understand what The Visitor was teaching me, and bridge the isolated epistemologies of Western body knowledge I’d be studying. When the pieces were complete and aligned, Ancestor was born.
I performed a contact imrov duet with the Ancestor near the Mississippi River. Documented in a 12-minute video, what was supposed to be a dance of restoration, it soon became a task of heightened anxiety as I imagined the police responding to a call that a Black man was next to the river with a dead body.
Ancestor the body and video were exhibited at Regis Center for Art in Minneapolis where guests were invited to rest and meditate. Days following the exhibition, the pain I had been living disappeared overnight.
In Fall 2022, Ancestor’s meaning radically changed when it was recontextualized during a roadtrip across Iceland. After documenting Ancestor in Vestmannaeyjar Islands, I read an account from 1627 of Barbary Corsairs capturing more than 300 Icelanders and transporting them into slavery in North Africa. Villagers who fled to the nearby mountain witnessed the capture, and in other cases, brutal deaths of their Ancestors.
An ongoing project, Ancestor has become a portal through which we can communicate with our Ancestors.
