How do you characterize the media you work in?

I’m predominantly a writer and a researcher, though I also work with music and objects. My background is in geology—I’m a trained coastal sedimentologist—and I think about earth’s processes as the ultimate Indigenous knowledge system. In my work I focus on unearthing Indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems, which might help us to get out of the death loop of a system we’re in, which looks a lot like capitalism, private property, and the carceral system.

How does your practice engage with technology?

I’m interested in looking back at technologies that are no longer alluring so we can see the allure of contemporary technologies with more clarity. In connection to my own background, especially in the American South, Black people were once the technology of the day. When a certain degree of extraction and extortion was no longer possible, that technology was rejected. At the same time, when I witness a Black person pick up a musical instrument like turntables, I see an exciting technological conversation. Technology can be really affirming but of course there’s a shadow in technology and the economics of technology that isn’t going to leave it.

What was your focus during your time at Eyebeam? Was there a culminating project?

Because the structure of the Eyebeam fellowship was open-ended and flexible without set expectations, it really supported creative work. I did something I’ve never done before, which was work in sculpture. I carved a sculpture out of a cypress tree, which is the state tree of Louisiana, and gave it a door and foot. My hope was that the piece wouldn’t be easy to consume. When I was sculpting, I was thinking about the visual history of the South, and the status of the outsider artist as an epistemological disruptor. There are so many outsider artists in the South who have a different way of seeing that doesn’t even acknowledge institutional criteria, which is such a radical gesture. These are the works that end up being the most interesting.

How has dialogue or collaboration with Eyebeam artists and alumni factored into your work?

In my Eyebeam cohort, which was a really brilliant group of people, we spoke a lot about anti-colonial practices, and how we can “talk back” to colonialism. [2022-2023 Democracy Machine Fellow] Daniela Ortiz, an artist from Peru, was working on a project that dealt with currency and monuments, which was quite interesting to me; I think it’s so important that people look at how the state tries to influence narratives and ways of seeing. I also had really helpful conversations with the fellows about my sculpture in relation to illegibility and opacity.

How do you think about the role of the artist in society?

I think that, if the artist has a role in society, it’s to help people realize that they have gestures inside of them that can help others, and those gestures don’t have to be couched in or tied to an existing system before you enact them. I’m only now coming to terms with calling myself an artist, and I’m recognizing that it was other artists that gave me the motivation to both tell myself and openly express that there are things you can do to push against this world for a better one. And that can be at an incredibly small scale, because what is scale anyway?