IslandBedBody
Mineral Wool, Blue Polyethylene Tarp, Sugarcane from Florida and Barbados, Virginia Gold Tobacco, Mississippi Brown Lint Cotton, Water.
In Sylvia Wynter’s 1995 essay “1492: A New World View”, she states that the “New World’s emerging racial capitalist Atlantic economy and pseudo-society promised wealth and power for (white) ‘Man’ and nothing(ness) for Black bodies.” Life as death articulated the Black Atlantic world. In “Mapping Black Ecologies”, a 2019 essay by the historians J.T. Roane and Leah Kaplan, they examine how Black ecological analysis produces “deep maps,” a way of historicizing and analyzing the ongoing reality that Black communities in the U.S. South and the wider African diaspora are most susceptible to the effects of climate change, as well as the ongoing effects of toxic stewardship. How do we conceive of futures outside of destruction? I see it equally fitting to include plants that have historically been exploited, used to alter geographies and ecologies, and are routinely othered into the space of sacrifice and the sacrificial. These plants, too, are haunted by the afterlives of slavery. The ecological decay experienced in a time-space punctuated by my continual return, watering, planting, functions as an active understanding of the materiality of disparity and deprivation.
Through the time it takes to care for and grow these crops that are marked forever by colonization and forced labor/slavery, I reposition them as not only “crops” but as the plants they are, doing what plants are designed to do... grow. Though the conditions are less than ideal, all the necessary requirements are met: sun, water, and substrate. Though deprived of naturally occurring nutrients that are found in soil, the plants find a way. The sugarcane, given an ample supply of water, shoots up rapidly but has its growth stymied by a starved environment. Mineral wool, with its origins in basalt chalk and rock, has been fired beyond its properties’ natural state and spun into a woolly layering that cannot properly hold water. Lacking porosity and rendered hydrophobic, it can only suspend that which does not escape its intricate layers. The remaining water sits to be absorbed by convection or plant roots. The tobacco, which is dying slowly after sprouting and becoming small buds about the size of my thumb, are replaced by mossy green remnants with tiny sporic plant bodies that reflect an adaptive hybrid of new life in the midst of toxic unsustainability. The cotton, sprouted in a plastic jug filled with water, is newly planted, so we will see what results come.
Do these plant bodies reflect the human condition?
As our bodies adaptively absorb microplastics, as we epigenetically grow with polluted soil, water, and air, can we as readily see the affects of our environment like we do with this bed (of death)?
So much usable water sits below, beneath the bed, atop a blue plastic tarp that is also hydrophobic and nonporous. The inorganic materials that are manufactured to form the bed mirror the chemicals and materials that make up the Polaroid. This is the polaroid outside of the frame, a replica of the abstracted destruction that is so visually appealing yet intellectually/emotionally disturbing/repulsive. Why is it so easy to shrink away from the truth? This is where we are. What we’ve built. What we’ve endured. If we cannot see with clear eyes, if we cannot make meaning, if we will never understand, we will never find a way through. For that is where we have to go – through.
2024-2025.
All photos by Naakita f.k.