[audio installation
bronze / textile /
hydrostone sculpture
& video]

| NOV 9 - JAN 9, 2024 @ 500 Capp Street |

a spiral fuels and fills

In 2022 I was able to go to Wisconsin to participate in the ACRE residency. There I would be encouraged to develop an earth work called spiral fire no. 1. The earth work was a ~25’ x 25’ spiral pit fire. This particular earth work had been on my mind and heart for years; eventually making its way into my psyche as an artist. My deep appreciation for laborious durational performance work and a love/appreciation for labor. In hours I dug the pit and with support from residents and residency staff I filled it with firewood.

Later in the evening I was joined by other residents to talk about what we inherited and what the spiral meant to us. Together we tended to the fire. Through our labor, strategy and collaboration we were able to sustain the fire well into the dark Wisconsin summer night. The piece created tension and discord that I personally wasn’t prepared for. The experience inspired me to begin considering what it meant to really be with others and signaled a turning in my practice towards a collaborative process. I’m anchored in this movement by these questions: How do we best collaborate? Regardless of our intentions, conflict is bound to arise. How can we navigate it with integrity? Do I need to like you in order to build with and/or for you?

Along with ten other artists who I have collaborated with before (both at ACRE and here within the Bay Area) I created sankofa which is the audio installation present within 500 Capp Street. Sankofa (which is said to translate to “go back and get it”) comes from the Akan people of Ghana and is an Adinkra symbol, that often appears as a bird flying forward with it’s head turned behind it, egg perched on tail.

To me, it is indicative of a spiral. A fetching, so to speak, of the past as one moves forward into the future.

When I began my year-long residency at 500 Capp Street, I spent hours on I-5 listening to books. One of them being Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. I was especially intrigued by a thought around the phenomena of dance, possession, the circle, and the colonial function. Fanon stated that the “circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits.”

For me, the spiral, like the circle, protects and permits but it also fills us with knowledge/ways of being that we’ve inherited. It fuels us as we move forward. The spiral embodies “sankofa”, in spirit, form, and function.

As we “go back and get” words from our revolutionary ancestors and contemporaries, as we go back and get our ancestral ways of relating to each other and Earth, we pro- pel ourselves forward. We reconfigure these cultural/relational tools as a means of survival for ourselves and our people.

The artists who created audio works for a spiral fuels and fills / sankofa were asked to respond to four questions:

What do we inherit?
What fuels us to act?
What nourishes us?
What must we destroy?

For a spiral fuels and fills I have conceptualized 500 Capp Street / the David Ireland House as a body. The fireplaces as the heart, the archives/basement as the bowels, the hallways as the throats, and so on. The audio works were located in most rooms within the home and play, queued and in sequence, in a spiraling formation.