in the end it was all about love
in the end it was all about love
as it will be, as it has been
Today as I have since February, I show up grieving and heartbroken. This one feels different and my response to it has been to take time (really bend time cause grieving time is trippy) to dig through the rubble of worlds ending to figure out what exactly even happened.
I’ve been reflecting and in so many ways, all of my recent artworks have been about the dance between love and death, pleasure and grief as much as they have also been about blackness, capitalism, the body, and technology.
Portal Open was about finding my way home to a world of deep expansive and loving connection severed by the technology of colonialism. In Pursuit of Black Noise was what I imagined life would be like if love lost and death took over1. Enclosures began from an inquiry of what could connection be if we valued each others freedom instead of creating dynamics fueled by tools of control (a feature that appears in the State but also in our relationships). Conjuratio and Gaze Makes the Glitch (Expanded) offered tools I believed moved me toward an ethics of love and therefore an ethics of life through magic, deep listening, and somatic practices. And a recent project “Water Me,” was about an eco-erotic practice to heal the wounds of disconnection to self, other, and land and remember love.
Diana doing a grief ritual in “Water Me,” (2022)
It is a deep belief of mine that Capitalism is an algorithm that violently enforces an anti-Love embodiment and is fueled by a drive for Death, an ABSOLUTE Death of all things that results in complete dissolution and disconnection.
To me Love is Life is Freedom. It is an anti-capitalist practice & an eco-erotic practice. It is not just what I feel, although feelings are important but rather it is also what I do and what I conjure.
Everything Capitalism has taught me is disconnection and disembodiment. It has taught me to forget. It has removed me from my homes. It has taught me to see others as a threat. It has taught me to obey and conform to expectations around gender, sexuality, and race. It has made me believe that doing it “all on my own” is a victory.
So I stand here in an alternative space, creating my own myths of infinite possibilities asking myself: who do I want to be knowing that I can be anyone? what do I want to birth, knowing that I can create anything? where do I want to go, knowing that I can go anywhere?
These questions might seem a bit much to you, but if there was anything I learned from my eight months of studying hypnosis and the brain is that imagination is one of our most powerful tools for change.
Today I came across this quote: “The search for love is a creative project, a great act of imagination that is shaped at least as much by where we are going as by where we have been.”
Love will show up in my next creative project as it always has.
Love will show up in the quiet moments of grief.
Love will show up through the way my fingers press down on the keys creating these sigils that will deliver a little dose of magic to you.
Love will show up through our connection mediated by screens across time and space.
It was never lost, just like we were never disconnected.
I’m excited to be a part of Conjurings hosted by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) happening this summer curated by Erika Sprey and artists Lamin Fofana and Sky Hopinka alongside side Emmy Catedral and Manuela Moscoso. We are guided by their question: “How do we dream not only about ourselves? That is to say, to dream not only about ourselves, but about each other, about beings of the forest, of water, of animals, buildings, shelter—of concrete or invisible beings as porous interdependent entities reliant on each other and everything around us.”
Hope to see you there :)
I don’t often show this project any more as it was during a time of complete pessimism when I believed the only ending to this story of life was an absolute death. I am still proud of it but it is not what I’d like to represent my current framework, which is funny to me as this is the project most asked about for showings and interviews.