Minted in enemy bronze. Coined in the reshaped minerals of those positioned as antagonistic. Over the past decade, a non-studio practice has emerged in my work dedicated to rethinking the shifting of language through implied antagonisms and movement beyond those aesthetics and materials canonized as public forms of collective memory. The practice speaks to the reclaiming of iconography repurposed from its utility in the construction of a seemingly linear projection of power and dominance, from the winged victory of Roman invasion to the angel of Christianity’s victory over mortality.
The practice grapples with all of those triggering histories and contemporary realities that shape our relationship to each other and that attempt to position Black history in the Italian context as merely four decades old. The psycho-spiritual excavation of thousands of years of Black presence on this land and the restitution of these dimensions and perspectives of history to the present are only part of what is enacted within and beyond the small lens of a 50-year-old super8 camera. Walter Rodney calls upon intellectuals of African descent to engage in “groundings” with each other and with a broader range of “the masses”. These exchanges of truth telling, of critical opposition, of repose from the grips of an oppressive system, of shared trauma, of non alignment, are central to the site based film work that has resulted from the initiation of this practice. The co-travellers, the soothsayers, all of those who have passed time with me have been reflectors of the tensions that exist just beyond the elaborately constructed facades of a hegemonic vision of Italianness that refuses to recognize its fragility induced fear.
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Minted in Enemy Bronze, 2023. Installation view at the British School at Rome
