a southern wild

a southern wild (2020) is a series of performed moving images that construct a present-day encounter with black/African labor in American tobacco farming through archival photographs. It explores relationships between the black African body, tobacco, and the British impetus to enslave and transit Africans to Virginia for its harvest.

The series probes tobacco as sacred botanical material turned bestializing entity. Time is collapsed in these images through a merging of archival images of tobacco plantations and black tobacco farmers in the American South with still images of a performative “tarring” of my body with golden syrup and “feathering” with shredded tobacco.