23.10.23 – 6.11.23
I’ll be using my Digital Residency to present research for my recent body of work, Fetissoes, where I speculate that a group of enslaved African people jumped overboard their captors ship into the ocean and combine European maritime technology (the master’s tools) with fetishes (African religious objects with magical powers) to create tools to safely return home underwater.
My research crosses into modern and historic traditional African religious practice, European perceptions of African fetishes, the resultant Christianisation of former African colonies, the persistent, pernicious cultural impact of Christian mission work therein, and my own fraught relationship with Christianity as a colonial import. It will be presented in the form of imagined chain messages and memes. Updated daily, I will use primitive animation, gifs, and other vestiges of Web.0 to create these images, fabulating evidence of viral, colonial digital mission work.