My artistic expression and work is centered around renaturalization and rewilding in material and imagined spaces/bodies of ‘capital ruins’ and ‘colonial discards.’ The abandonment of space constructed through the economic relations of capitalists to physical environments poses a central theme to my work. I am curious about the urgency of regeneration, repurposing, and reimagining the spaces that industry has abandoned. The questions I seek to ask are related to understanding the errors and incompatibility of having human sustenance, non-human survival, and ecological sustainability under the normative conditions of socio-economic growth.

I seek to inquire: what is left when industry moves on? what memories are left? what is the utility of this space in shifting the paradigm of exploitation and production, to reciprocity and healing-regeneration? Designers, planners, and industry executives must realize that the key to addressing the climate crisis is not ‘green’ capitalism or development, but degrowth and the rewilding of the built environment. Inextricable to the concept of ‘capital ruin’ is the impact of how industry and capitalism has rendered certain human lives worthy of being discarded.

Tracing the logic of colonization, I want to document the intertwined results of environmental degradation and racist exploitation. As indigenous people have suffered ecocide through the sustained occupation of their land, and black people have suffered the forced construction of their ontological being in diaspora from their ancestral home, there is a crucial need to reorient, or renaturalize/decolonize these communities to access their cultural ways of being.

Therefore, the work of the body becomes investigating the epistemological histories of these communities, connecting these displaced colonized communities to the authentic traditions of their people, empowering their sovereignty to redesign and reestablish relationships with the physicality of the ‘capital ruin,’ and then constructing this imagining into reality.

The praxis of this work is twofold: theoretical-- rigorous research and mixed methodologies that pinpoint the essence of climate crisis and spatial injustice through a legacy of colonization-- and practical--articulating and designing the transformative principles that are necessary to remake these communities into spaces that actually sustain life. Utilizing the theories of post-structuralism, post-colonial studies, black marxism, the black feminist tradition, indigenous ecofeminisms, and imaginative disciplines of black futurism/psychoanalysis/surrealism, I will work with historical maps and zoning plans/policies to subvert these records of the past with the lessons of the observed injustice of communities through time.

The critical annotations, abstraction, visualizations, and sonic compositions will produce radical productions of installation, interactive workshopping, occupations of significant spaces, participatory public engagements, passive exhibitions, and policy presentations to synthesize the interconnection of art, policy, design, and industry. This project feels timely and appropriate as the rhetoric of liminality (of space, resources, goods, food, political will, social transformation, etc.) emerges with more apocalyptic saliency and the tactics being employed will only replicate injustice into the future. The imperative of this project is to establish a legitimate, multidisciplinary, and community-centered project into changing the semiotics and aesthetics of ‘progressive’ planning for addressing injustice and preparing for the future.