Ongoing body of work, SPRING-FALL 2021–
The BLACKLANDS Collection of stationery artefacts.
Another world, an “Afrotopic” act of defiance; a Black Future. SHOP HERE.
A world in my Black past and my Black future at the same time…BLACKLANDS is like nothing I’ve ever done before. It’s my offering to our future, it’s my contribution to propaganda. It’s my stretching myself as an artist. It’s my hope and lamentation for us… It’s my laughter at the colonizer.
The BLACKLANDS collection was birthed at the juncture of several key moments in late 2020. First, it was revising the VGB bookleting Towards Historicing. I’d been revisiting Black history all of 2020 and something about publishing the bookletine put me in a headspace of imaginative rage into which I delved further throughout December 2020. I encourage teastained women to keep their written records for sake of their personal history, and when we look at how Black history has been butchered and erased it convicts you all the more as to how, through journaling, we are giving out descendants what we ourselves do not have as Black people: history with agency.
Next, it was receiving penpal letters (another reason penpalling is vital to our historicizing practice!) asking about my vision for a Black Future. While another penpal shared with me how her new move to Tulsa, OK—the former home of the Black Wall Street, bombed by the US government in 1921–put her in a pensive mournfulness as she observed the shrugging erasure that haunts the city. These penpals letters encouraged me all the more to set out and create what I believe is a collection of work that is both an expression of grief and a new story to be told for our Black Future.
I believe the final push was with the Most High’s guidance and whispers as I was purchasing seeds for my 2021 growing season. December 2020 I was tending my winter garden, planting medicinal herbs, and packaging my summer 2020 soil for overwintering and compost amendment. While in my garden I spent time considering our connection to the land and how visceral, spiritual, natural and Divine it is. I wanted to make a “penpal kit” but one thing led to another as Yah leads, and one element birthed another and another until I had to surrender to a body of work I named BLACKLANDS.
Blacklands—a series of stationery for imaginary institutions in an imagined Black past and future— is a whimsical lamentation, a re-presentation, a reminder, a futuring exercise, and propaganda. There are many elements to this collection, which posits (through a very limited lens) what world would exist if we overthrew the colonizer.
Perhaps this presentation can yield to ideas that further posit what roles we should have, what glory is available to us when we disown this vile system and claim our rightful inheritance. Over the generations, Colonizers’ use of land as a torture device against our peoples has manifested in our displacement from a rightful relationship to it. Although this is changing and many of us are returning to land and keeping of earth’s bounty, there is still much to restore at the spiritual and mental realms. We can ideate this by looking at our history and posing questions of what could have been had white vileness not interrupted, interfered and intercepted? The VGB Blacklands collection is a presentation of futuring artefacts in the form of stationery, presenting paper offerings from a world that never was. I invite your imagination and rage to participate and promulgate this Afrofuturist propaganda.
This is my offering for those of us moving towards historicizing: aretfacts of whimsical lamentation to help create new ideas for our future histories. The idea is that in learning who we are, we might reimagine what we might be. I hope these anti-mythological artefacts bring you to a place of imaginative grief for our people and what has happened to suppress us from monumentality. I also hope that this activates another realm of your imagination as creating it did mine, where you reflect on history for opportunities to constructively honor the resilience in your blood, bones—ancestral memory. May you be delighted and quickened.
WE ARE EXODUSTERS
WE ARE MONUMENTAL
WE ARE RESTED PIONEERS
WE ARE GENEALOGISTS—AND ASSASSINS
WE ARE ECONOMIC INNOVATORS
WE ARE CONNECTED TO NATURE
WE ARE MOTHERS’ MOTHERS
love.
chimene