CURA.

Precious Okoyomon’s latest installation, the first work welcoming the public back into Performance Space New York since the pandemic began, is an offering to those who enter, to sit or stand or lay down in the uncomfortable space of grief that we so often avoid. Considering the events of 2020—the pandemic and the repeating horrors of Black death—and responding to the brutal mood of apocalypse and rapture in the past year, Okoyomon sought to create an ecosystem that could hold grief.

Through Okoyomon’s use of natural materials—swirling with the symbolic weight of the kudzu ash—this work considers the thesis of Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and surrounds the notion that our atmospherical and climatological conditions are not just structured by anti-Blackness, but further founded in and through Black death. Sharpe refers specifically to how the environmental effects of slavery and the slave trade have quite literally transformed our physical world, and its patterns, and to how the ever-present psychological pressure applied on Black life by and after chattel slavery is an environment in and of itself.

Describes Okoyomon, “The creation of Earthseed started this ever-flourishing garden of kudzu, which was allowed to evolve and escape and be truly wild. In the end, it had to be killed: it couldn’t be transplanted to a new environment because it’s a monster. And the way I had to burn it all and the way that ash gets to have a new life here, it seemed the only reconcilable wake we could do for it, and one that would reflect the timeline of death we’ve been in. 2020 was the reckoning of death, and we’re still living in it. We have to face it and live in it and allow it to change us and be changed by it.”