Natural: or Where Are We Allowed To Be

2021
3 film prints with captions, mounted on sintra
36” x 48” (Size of each print)

Where are we allowed to be? Where are the places that it is seen as natural for us to assert our presences? Who has ownership or control over those places and the narratives that feed into them? In the three prints that make up Natural: or Where Are We Allowed To Be, a Black woman wanders through a data center that carries her own information and asserts answers to the question of what her relationship to the place should be.

This work is an extension of the artist's contribution to the book Uncertain Archives, also titled Natural. See an excerpt below:

“The machine of contemporary American society insists that people have imagined places, and I have come to see that in the tech world, the preferred place for black people is within data. In datasets we appear as the perfect subjects: silent, eternally wronged, frozen in a frame of injustice without the messiness of a face / accent / hint of refusal. It is easier to deal with datasets about black people than it is to dwell on the great gears of a system that penalizes darker skin tones, or to consider the resentment that generations of state-sanctioned neglect could breed. It is easier to see black people as numbers and bodies than as encounters and people. When structural workings of racism meet the distancing power of quantification, both combine to freeze us in place.”