I have used palm oil in several works. Palm oil, combined with gunpowder and lemon juice, was poured over slaves to cover bruises and marks before they were sold. There is an interesting layering that happens here with palm oil as a commodity but also the enslaved as a commodity. Previously, in a performance, I covered my body with palm oil. The obvious next step was to create casts in an attempt to merge these two. While walking in Richmond, Virginia , I started picking up bricks to use as a base to place my casts. Part of my research led me to the history of the brick in the US, where slaves would harvest clay from the James River to make bricks. Based on the research I decided to create a monument, where the casts would lay on top of another to impart the sense of a pile of bodies. Eventually, these palm oil body casts melt and disappear. The large cube/base made of 1000-1400 bricks is the only thing that would remain, giving the sense of a removed monument.

The following weeks after the performance, I proceeded to go back to the site of the performance to collect bricks. I would collect 10 - 15 bricks at a time to place them back to the locations that I took them from. Due to the palm, gunpowder and lemon juice that melted on them, the bricks would stained with this mixture. This act would reinforce the removal of my action and my temporary monument. I consider these stained bricks that are embedded on the sidewalks of the city of Richmond as small invisible memorials. The markers in the map above are a few locations where bricks were placed back.

The Impossibility

OYA-9394 (in progress)
 I am continually thinking about a space where I can live without my body being in a constant state of threat. Sun Ra, like many other Afrofuturists, mentions space as being the place where Black people must go in order to escape systems of oppression and violence. As I continue to reflect on Afrofuturism and alternative futures, what keeps coming to mind is the development of space(s) that are inclusive, the destruction or restructuring of capitalism, and the decolonization and unlearning of many beliefs that have brought us to where we are today. Many times, I have tried to imagine what the world would look like without capitalism… and even  today I have difficulty envisioning what that might be. Writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher calls this Capitalism Realism, which is "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."  As I look at my past and my present I cannot think about utopian futures.

The OYA- 9394 suit makes me hyper-visible. When I am without it, I adopt ways of surviving and blending in. I constantly question the way I dress, the way I speak, and the words that come out of my mouth. Focusing on the idea of a dystopian future, I consider the OYA suit a type of armor, a protective suit made with materials that I can find--made with the technology available on earth. I do not have the means to leave Earth but others do. I think about space exploration as something that is meant to benefit mostly White folks--people with wealth, and power. But the day they depart Earth there will not be much left for me here. I will need to develop further methods of survival.

The prototype is assembled from 3 chemical-resistant overalls, an acrylic dome as a helmet, and a waterproof backpack. In the second prototype, I use shock survival blankets and ac aluminum tape to create the overalls. In this version, I cover my helmet to conceal my identity with a black veil. I recently walked the Slave Trail in Richmond dressed in the OYA-9394 suit, and I made offerings along my path.

OYA-9394 (in progress)

Performance By Raquel Vasquez La Roche and Luis Vasquez La Roche. 

My sister and I walk through sugar cane fields in Trinidad and Tobago that were harvested by the British to produce sugar, but that were previously cotton plantations under the Spanish crown. These fields remember all the free labour by my enslaved ancestors.  

We are both dressed in our protective suits like we just arrived on these lands from the future. We walk and  dig through the soil and lift up our childhood basketball hoop. There is a play between the word cancha  in spanish and its translation to english. Cancha in Spanish exclusively means court  in English, but it could also be translated to the word field. I am interested in the  range of opportunities that black families have. What does it mean to work in a cotton or sugar cane field in the past, and what does it mean to be an athlete or an entertainer in the present? I was one of those black kids that only saw themselves represented in media through sports and music. What are the parallels between these?

"Despues de 20 años"

"No, son 20"

Canchas de Algodon de Azuar

But the real ones, just like you, just like me, is the 1st part of 3 performances, which take place in a sugar cane field in Couva, Trinidad. In the performance, I “clean” a sugar cast of an Air Jordan 1’s. I scrub with a brush and rub with my hands until the shoe dissolves. As it melts, certain parts shoe get sharper, and it cuts my hands as I try to “rub it clean”. No longer the shoe gets “cleaned” with just a brush and water but is also being “cleaned” with blood.

Not too far away from where the performance took place, there is housing developments, schools and recreational spaces. There is an abandoned sugar factory called Brechin Castle, which has been closed and empty since 2003. Nearby, there is also a school and a golf course. There is sugar cane, houses, a cricket/soccer field and a basketball court. What does it mean for some of these areas to become housing developments, soccer fields, or recreation areas?

I layer the AJ1’s and sugar to reference different periods of exploitation and profiteering off of Black people. Trinidad was a Spanish colony from the late 1400s to the early 1800s, when we became a British Colony. “The crop one found here was not sugar, but cotton”1. Enslaved Africans and indentured workers of Indian descent worked in these sugar plantations. In 1937, these sugar estates eventually became Caroni Ltd (Brechin Castle). The sugar industry in Trinidad finally collapsed in the early 2000s.

The branding behind Air Jordans and Michael Jordan was one of the few representations of successful Black men for me while growing up in Venezuela. On the other hand, it also became a synonym of being a Mono2 or Macaco3. In other countries like Chile, they would use the word Flaite4, which derives from the counterfeit version called Flight Air. The AJ1’s is such an iconic item within Black culture —utilising the success of Black athletes as a marketing strategy to sell it to its primary consumer, the black community.

With this performance, I try to establish a link between the material and the object and the new ways in which capitalism has managed to exploit Black folks.

I stand in this cane field where my enslaved ancestors were forced to work the land, with this counterfeit version of AJ1’s, giving the sugar back to the soil. Making it disappear, but it costs me my blood.


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Luis Vasquez La Roche