Energy Management to Post Pone the End of the World - E.M.P.P.E.W. , 2017 - present.

Performance of a garment made of photo portraits transferred onto Iroko wood and further dissolved, raffia, and cowry shells.

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E.M.P.P.E.W. is a garment made of semi-erased portraits transferred onto Iroko 1x1" chips, that are serially attached by conductor wire to strings of raffia, activated by a swirling performance. Along with the portraits, some of the Iroko wood chips received a mirror or were simply voided of any imagery, opening further unclassified modes of beings, seeing, projecting and receiving.

The materials and design of the garment evoke Obaluaye, the Orisha related to social cure in Transnational African Diaspora religious practices.  The end of the world is a metaphorical shift indicating trouble then, now and ahead in our communal lives. The idea of delaying it comes from Krenak philosopher Ailton Krenak and his wonderful book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World in which from a Brazilian Krenak indigenous perspective, the philosopher proposes a shift in life practices, energy management and creativity to face the brutal transformations we are witnessing now, to face the Anthropocene. 

The portraits transferred onto the Iroko wood squares- a symbolic Western African three of connection between the spiritual- Orun and the Aye - mundane worlds, and an Orisha itself- indicate the elusive quality of portraiture, “modes of self,” and modes of “others.” They are more than a hundred individual portraits from multiple regions and times of the world whose fixed visual identities had been transferred, and dissolved, and that are completely blurred and unified by the ritual/performance of repetitive swirling and an additional vocabulary of movements intended to manage the surrounding energies.

As a moving emblem, it both holds and releases tension, it both gathers and hides in plain site, emanating healing radiance from the breeze it produces and the visualities it both assembles and disperses with and about “the healing potential of some deregulated togetherness ...” (Cervenak, 2012.11).

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