Free The Land (2024)

‘Free The Land’ is a slogan attributed to the Republic of New Afrika, a Black Nationalist organization started in Detroit advocating for an independent Black nation-state in the Black Belt US South.

In this piece I explore land as a site of political struggle. A wooden frame cycles a quilt on a loop, driven by a motor. The frame is painted in colors referencing Earth Tones of the late 70’s and early 80’s. These colors represented a nostalgia for an idealized return to nature, at a period when the onset of digital culture was already bearing down. Synthetic abstractions of oxide earth pigments were prominent in design and technology of the period. Through the use of these colors I explore themes of the human distance from nature in relation to technological progress.

At the same time that minerals were being abstracted into digital material, the analog to digital transition, there was a transition point in revolutionary movements in the western hemisphere. The onset of the digital paradigm in the 70’s paralleled revolutionary defeat and a resurgence of conservatism in the 80’s. Revolutionaries compromised, bought into middle-class ideals and sought to work within the system. 

Thinking about the materiality of digital culture as an abstraction of the earth, I continued working within the Earth Tones color theme by using deconstructed clothing and found fabric to make the quilt. Camouflage matched the palette, because camo is also a human abstraction of the natural landscape designed to simulate territory. 

I began this piece while in residence at ACRE in rural southwest Wisconsin, and while shopping at an antique shop looking for fabric I encountered an army green tactical military surplus section, which included Americanized knockoffs of the Palestinian keffiyeh. The traditional pattern of the keffiyeh contains motifs that represent olives, fishing nets, and waves–references to the land and the sea woven into the garment that became a symbol of guerilla resistance. As I stitched the ‘keffiyeh’ and the camo cloth together, I contemplated bombs manufactured on US soil dropped on Palestinian land. I thought about Congolese people forced to mine the minerals that make the technology possible for us to even witness genocide. I thought about the mass produced corporate keffiyeh as a long tradition of attempts to neutralize resistance through appropriation, the abstraction of natural elements into synthetic imitations. And I thought about the movement of Black freedom fighters here in the heart of empire, seeking their own sovereignty, chanting, “Free The Land”. 

The quilt is constructed in 3 vertical strips, each a different width, like fractal layers of time representing seconds, minutes, and hours, or days, months, and years, etc. Different rates of change proceed simultaneously.