BLACKLANDS: An Introduction
It’s an unquanitifiable debt, what is owed to Black people for all we have created/contributed/innovated with regards to land, agriculture, botany, etc. Our torture-driven work, our uncompensated work, our hopeful work, our barely recognized work with land, seed, crop, soil, and botanical sciences has given white men multigenerational wealth that most of them are living off of today. Vanilla, indigo, cotton, tobacco, pecan trees—all of these and MORE are our blood relatives due to slavery’s vile institution. I definitely see our return to the land as a form of reclamation but it’s only the beginning...
“I want this collection to be whimsically challenging and joyfully combatant against all the parts of us that have yet to remember what we have brought to the land we tread.”
BLACKLANDS comes from this lament. My conscience prevented me from merely designing floral stationery with ignorant blossom arrangements and aloof leaves, thinking it’s special just because it’s from a Black stationery artist. Not when my people have built foundations for this country (and all the countries we were enslaved) with land and botany. It would be insulting and a missed opportunity to NOT show our brilliance; to reduce the story down to botanical “aesthetic” when there should be rage and indicting work. No. Not when our blood soaks these grounds furthering our relation to the soil. For us, flowers, crop cultivation, “gardening”, and even homesteading have bloody, pithy, weighty roots that I couldn’t shrug with a botanically-themed stationery collection disconnected from ancestral memory.
We are the soulful stewards, the earthy replenishers, the herbalists and medicine humans, the intuitive plant cultivators—BLACKLANDS comes from THIS lament. I want this collection to be whimsically challenging and joyfully combatant against all the parts of us that have yet to remember what we have brought to the land we tread. I also want it to make us collectively curious about all we have yet to know, and posit what we deserve, from rest to vengeance... My part is with paper but so many of you play vital parts in exegeting and exhuming our history.
This is how we can keep better records.
Hail up to Dr. Tanisha M. Williams @t_marie_wms and her work with #blackbotanistsweek for helping us peel back the veil and walk with all the more power and dignity—I never knew what I never knew. And to Dr. Timothy E. Nelson and Dr. Maya Allen for preventing Blackdom, NM from floating into the realm of fantastical legend. Also a big hail up to Prof. John Jennings @johnjenningsart for his life-changing lecture on “Sankofarrration” and the creation of new mythologies. And finally to Tricia Hersey @thenapministry for humming it into our minds that we Black people deserve rest for the bone-breaking work we have encased in our Black bodies as resistance against demonic white terrorism.
Combining [some of ] our history with the land with Afrofuturism, BLACKLANDS is a body of stationery for imaginary institutions related to land and our history surrounding it. I’ll be releasing its propaganda-esque artefacts for the rest of spring/summer.
Journey Soulfully
chimene
