CURA.

The idea underlined here, in Ahmed’s quote, is embodied in Harris-Babou’s practice. The artist looks to depict the importance of the political and social sedimentation within specific objects or discourses, which is neither available nor evident in their assigned role as aspirational commodities.

For instance, in the video work Red Sourcebook from 2018, the artist is filmed circling and marking the pages of a home decorations catalog with a red sharpie. The cinematic shots of Harris-Babou nonchalantly flipping through the catalog are accompanied by subtitles. These quote a broad range of textual materials that the artist used as research. On the one hand, there are passages used from a 1936 Federal Housing Administration document for home loans, advising on how to keep the property value up: “A home close to a public park or nature is safe from lower social occupancy coming from that direction.”² On the other hand, there are passages taken from presentations by the spokesperson of the home-furnishing company Restoration Hardware: “We curate the very best people, products, ideas and inspiration from around the world. We put each in a composition that renders them more, not less, valuable. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, or, as he quotes Steve Jobs about “ratcheting up our species through taste.”³

These juxtaposed sources are compressed under the guise of corporate jargon, making for the accompanying text to sound and feel homogenous. This re-appropriation of textual materials can be inflammatory when taken out of their original context, and could become problematic, but it manages to successfully highlight systemic issues—specifically addressing the United States.

Redlining started in the US and Canada, and was done by marking on city maps the ‘problematic’ areas, in order to systematically cut them off from social or financial benefits (including banking, health insurance, and housing). This led to a long and discriminatory history of housing segregation and discrimination against black and brown communities, creating such a deep division in the geographies of cities and territories, that it is still felt today, after more than half-century of integration efforts.⁴

By showing the paradoxes embedded in pitches by aspirational brands like Restoration Hardware, Harris-Babou’s implicit critique shows how this traumatic history continues to linger, and how it is deeply embedded yet concealed under the glossy surfaces of our aspirational culture.

The artist renders a similar paradox through the video-work Human Design, produced in 2019 for the Whitney Biennial, where she questions how cultural currency is appropriated in contemporary design, and how specific histories are edited out.

Playing the role of the designer-as-genius who works for a company specializing in furniture and home accessories, Harris-Babou takes the viewer on a journey to discover the origins of “good design.” The video is a satire that imitates the aesthetic of the travel TV show, but what is initially the quest of finding the origin of two wooden plates carved with tribal patterns becomes a story of self-discovery.

“Design without the knowledge of its history origin and culture is like a tree without roots. I knew I had to find the source,”⁵ says the designer. Throughout the work, parody is signaled not only through the cringe-worthy and cliché corporate language, but also through other subtle elements that immediately stand out as generic tropes when taken out of their original contexts. For instance, the background music often played in retail stores is amplified in Harris-Babou’s video and is further used as an indicator of transitions between scenes. The parody, though humorous, conceals an important critique of how traditional objects and crafts are traded, appropriated and whitewashed, and how their history is discarded for traffic and commerce.

This journey takes the designer to Africa, where she finds the origins of the two plates on a small porch crowded with masks, totems, and other wooden carvings. But she requests an even deeper examination on the origin of these objects, which further leads to the “Maison des Esclaves” on Gorée Island, in Senegal. A house that was built in 1776, and used as a temporary holding center for African slaves to be sold overseas. Inside the house, a door known as “The Door of No Return”, opens up right into the gleaming ocean. Some accounts say that this door served as a direct passageway to lead hundreds, if not thousands, of slaves on ships. Harris-Babou’s video, like all her other works, does not disclose too much. The tragic history of the house remains unknown to the viewer until further investigation. But the emphasis is too straight-forward to ignore and too crucial to miss in understanding the work.

In her book, A Map to the Door of No Return, poet and writer Dionne Brand refers to The Door not only as a historical moment but also as a metaphorical inheritance that the Diaspora lives with:

The presence of this history can feel even more urgent in a context in which an object’s re-appropriation as a commodity fails to account for its past and its conditions of arrival. Harris-Babou manifests this urgency through different layers, personas, and experiences, devising a journey and recalling a trauma that is personal and collective, individual and universal. The artist uses humor and the comedic effects of appropriation and parody, to allure the viewer into deep waters: “It really comes down to how you frame things and what you let people see. The goal is to strip away excess and get down to fundamental ideas,”⁷ concludes the main character in Human Design. But this conclusion opens up to a powerful whirlpool of questions: whose history is abstracted, compressed, or omitted? For what purposes? Who has the power to define or strip an object away of its history? And for whom?