Performance //  Meadowcreek Golf Course at Pen Park and Farmington Country Club, Charlottesville, VA // 4 hrs // 2020. Photos taken by Morgan Aschom.

"Wake work refuses to silence the ongoing past, it brings a radically different kind of care to bear on the present." -Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Ode to Soil, explores landscapes and activates the soil in Charlottesville, Va where Black life and histories have been seemingly erased. As I continue to explore ideas of amnesia and what it means to be surviving, I turn to the soil as a living archive, a method of Black resistance and breath. 

The performance began by visiting my great-grandmother’s house in Madison, Va. I dig up her yucca, perennials, and resurrection lilies that have been planted in her yard since the property was granted to the family following emancipation. These resilient plants were commonly used in older African American and enslaved cemeteries to mark the graves of their loved ones due to the expense of headstones. 

As the sun rose, I took the plants to Pen Park, a former antebellum plantation turned recreation park and golf course. Within Pen Park’s golf course lies a cemetery for the former families who owned the plantation. Surrounding the cemetery are forty-three unmarked slave graves. Without permission, I entered the golf course and planted my great-grandmother’s yucca, perennials, and resurrection lilies to mark each grave. With the plants, I then walked to the hanging tree in front of Farmington Country Club. I walked the same train tracks John Henry James, a Black man who was falsely accused of raping a white woman in Pen Park, was abducted before being lynched. I planted a Yucca by the hanging tree. I did this in my grandpa’s old jean overalls. After I finished planting, I blessed the soil, watered the plants, and left the space.

I am not interested in memorial qua memorial, or the instrumentalization of black suffering for knowledge and healing. The acts of planting have been passed down from my great grandmother to grandfather, mother, and now to me. Planting is used as a form of care for these places and people who were never meant to be remembered especially in a way that tends to them with any kind of tenderness, care, or regard. I ask the viewer to consider how culture and memory are preserved and how yucca can pose an alternative version of a memorial, one that creates life and prompts care. The act of planting also serves as a metaphor for the tendency of our nation to forget it continues to grow on the institution of slavery and free Black and Brown labor (emotional and physical).

Ode to Soil

Installation // Dimensions variable // Soil from Pen Park and Farmington Country Club, Celosia, fungus // 2021

"What would it mean to consider Black aliveness, especially given how readily- and literally- Blackness is indexed to death?" - Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being

A Poetic of Living uses soil as a material that speaks to Black aliveness and resilience given how closely Black people are indexed to death. We remain through the soil. Soil holds trauma, displacement, memory, and history but is also a place of regeneration, possibility, and future.

Pen Park’s Recreation Park, formerly known as Pen Park Plantation, has a golf course. On the golf course are forty-three unmarked slave graves. At Farmington, there is a hanging tree where John Henry James was lynched in 1898. There are no forms of acknowledgment within these two spaces.

This work explores amnesia and how it is built into our quotidian spaces and influences our concept of history, stories remembered, things preserved, maintained, unaltered, or allowed to remain still. As you enter the space, the smell of wet mildew infiltrates the body, and uses repulsion as an aesthetic strategy. Yet, this smell derives from soil being what it is and asks the question: what would it mean if black people could just exist without the fear of corporeal violence? The viewer then has to walk over the soil to enter the space. In this action, they no longer become a spectator without agency, but rather, have to confront the soil to continue. 

I am interested in using a gesture of what it means to memorialize that is not linked to an Enlightenment framework of what it means to remain, such as a monument. In this installation, I use my body made from soil and place them in the soil from Pen Park and Farmington Country Club, two locations that are linked to past and present traumas and erasure. I place the soil body back in the earth, as an alternative monument that is made of our ancestors. One that grows life while seemingly unable to do so. Celosia, a plant native to East Africa and presumed to be brought over during the transatlantic slave trade along with fungus are then grown on the soil bodies. Through the eventual disintegration of the soil bodies, only the celosia and plants will remain. In this gesture, I ask the audience to consider systems of labor and loss enacted on the body as well as the food, plants, and knowledge transferred by enslaved people that has given root to what we see and know of beauty, intellect, technologies, and the sustenance we eat today. Soil becomes a way to speak to this notion of Black aliveness despite death and the ways one can care (through the act of growing and tending to these plants) that accounts for a possible otherwise despite the terror. The fungus and celosia simultaneously speak to the capacity of Blackness to evade capture and supersede the confines of whiteness. 


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