#axhsankofa

thank you! your work is a joy to find!

that’s a great question. shorty story - i’m an army brat from the USA who grew up between germany and the east coast US, primarily georgia and florida. 

recently i’ve been pondering the notion of home in relation to national identity shaped by colonialism so the short story doesn’t quite feel sufficient. i’ve been living for 28 years and every place i’ve lived has had some part in shaping who i am, so it feels like a more sure answer is earth. my spiritual interests might find some betrayal in that also, so, still, it’s tough to say concisely. 

SOME FINDINGS ON REMEMBERING

one of my favorite parts of grade school was show and tell. i loved being able to show and talk about stuff from home and see what other people’s homes and lives were like. middle school didn’t have show&tell so, unaware that frida kahlo was already a thing, i graffiti’d my journal. i drew lil pictures of myself in fubu, and eyes, and yin yangs, and wrote lil codes, but what i really enjoy, is that i drew myself in FUBU: me for me, us for us.

technology changed everything and when the selfie was born it changed the game.

when my mom got me a sprint flip camera phone, best believe i was practicing my light-skin-pretty-boy-squint and figuring out what angles would give me the most flattering myspace and paxed photos. when i was supposed to be doing homework for school, i use that faithful AOL dialup to update my favorite songs, share silly poems and woe is me rants, and talk to cute boys at the same time. 

later in life, i learned that show, don’t tell, was the key to good artmaking, it circumcised my willingness to share as plainly about my thoughts. and now i’m learning to restore a balance between showing and telling. 

self portraiture, even in the most casual sense, has grown into a way for me to remember where i’ve been, what i’ve done, and who was there with me. it’s casual practice of two principles central to my worldview and mental healthcare: self determination and self affirmation. i get to become my own director, photographer, producer, and talent as i preserve my own presence in time. the challenge for me, has been allowing other people to see me as freely as i allow myself to see other people. 

EVERYTHING AS SELFIE all of my offerings, poems, doodles, dances, whatever the scale, are types of self portraits too. i regard them no matter how janky they may be, because i don’t know what they will reveal in the future that they don’t reveal now. i want to live more freely while more fully loving myself and the world in which i exist.  i treat these creations with the same care i would a childs stick figure version of herself. i don’t chop it down based on it’s aesthetic or utilitarian function. i admire it with a beaming smile and applaud the effort.

i believe that if i take the charges to remember and create seriously, eventually, my selfies (and all of our photos and selfies) will paint a picture larger than any one photo or event in time and space could contain. i see the warnings about millennials and selfie culture and while i do see the temptation to idolatry and vanity, even acting on these impulses reveals truth. and turthful narration of history is important, even if, at first, it appears ugly. 

one of the caution i give myself (in all my work, not limited to selfies really) is this:

DO NOT become a public masturbator. which i define as; 

pleasing myself with myself in public and getting off on people’s reactions (be they enticed, embarrassed, enraged, or otherwise)

wasting the seed from my inner parts on self-gratification.

LOOKED AT i heed to this by seeking balance between looking deeply inward, and looking deeply outward. if i think of the whole world and see myself in it, my entire gaze must shift to align itself with that which is outside of me. should i one day become a tree, i’d learn very quickly how to reach outward to create myself. 

my roots would know to reach low AND my branches would know to reach high. the roots beneath the surface would send nourishment to the branches, and the branches will nourish the roots, and the whole tree flourishes. by some magical process, sunlight and oxygen nourish the inward parts, producing fruit to eat and seeds to grow. branches and leaves become shelter, and in the mere act of silent existence, tree’s are whole ecosystems to themselves, within another ecosystem, within a planet, within the solar system, and so on and so forth, like one of those russian dolls without any clear end or starting point.

while it’s true that life sustains in balance, life is not bound by binary logic and strictly dichotomous principles. looking outward and looking inward assume self as the observer, but what happens when we are observed? when we allow ourselves to be looked at?

what happens when we invite the other to our creation of self? not only as observing a looked at body in space, but actively participating in it’s change and memory of self?

BALANCE OF THE 3 EYES the balance i’ve been striving for and wresting with is a balance of 3 main gazes: self as observing other, self as observed by other, and self observing self. i’m interested in how these gazes (and whatever derivative variations there are) inform our creation of self. i’m asking, how do we release control over our perceptions of ourselves, and arrive at clarity and peace? 

as often as i photograph other people, i’m shy and reserved about other people creating images and pictures of me. i’m afraid of what they might find, what they’d see that they wouldn’t like, or what they’d reveal about me that i don’t know. (or even worse, don’t like.) i’ve asked questions about the nature of observation and the invitation of witness in my work and those questions can take you down some deep rabbit holes, so i’ll save that for another post.

for now i want to share these portraits dear friends and collaborators have made of me over the years. i love the ways they show me. words that come to mind when i look at them are joyful, pensive, hopeful, calm, together, accurate.

the first two are by @elainereejoice, 2013 and nika zakharov, 2015, respectively. 

my friend andrea sent me the last one this month and here’s the source photo from the first day i got to NYC this summer:

hi yall, it’s larry! i’m taking this photo to let all my social media friends know, i made it to NY safe and sound! :D i’m staying with a friend for now, but hopefully the audition goes well and i’ll be able to find a place and pay rent. thank yall so much for helping me and deanna on our new journeys, if you didn’t get to see us before we left, sorry! i’ll be back in april for sure so hopefully we can catch up then. and if you didn’t know why i’m in new york at all, sorry again, let me tell catch you up.

a lot has changed since then, and i’m glad for it. like @mslaurynhill said, anything that’s not growing is dead, so i thank god for the wisdom to grow.

all of our relatively inconsequential actions send ripples into the universe, and you never know when they will return. how we choose to receive and see them, is up to us. thankfully we don’t have to navigate those deep inner waters alone, the whole world is waiting for us to use it as a mirror. our friends and family are our collaborators, co-laborers as an integral part of the puzzle in how we remember, direct, and create the self, digitally and otherwise. 

it’s been 10 years since i left my home in family home columbus, ga. out the house and off to school. then out of school and off to life. then out of one life and into the next. or maybe i just kept the same life and changed time, space, and hair? 

i’ve been asking questions about remembering. i’m filled with questions about home, about history, about citizenship, about family, about culture, about war, about love, about manhood, about inheritance. i’m asking questions about my personal genesis, my artistic genesis, my queer genesis, and may of the answers are etched in these walls. i smell them in the kitchen, i hear them in dog barks and chit chat with mom. 

how do we remember ourselves and the people around us? how do i, at 28, with the resources available to me right now, make these memories and stories available in digital and nondigital media? what do we do with these memories, once recorded, who are they for? how do i construct a future with what is and what has been?

i’m back home in georgia for a week before heading back to brooklyn and i’m asking these questions. i don’t have any clear end or any clear answers. i know that i want to produce work from this process and i have been working. so far there are video interviews, self portrats, photos, dances, poems, and short essays.

professionally it feels as though my work is that of a historian or documentary portrait maker. i’m also a children’s fantasy author and poet. i’m also an exotic dancer version of frida kahlo making films like the suburban, ethnic blair witch project. this work is social commentary because colonization and war are written in my blood. 

personally i feel like i’m becoming a multi-media griot, and more in-tune son. 

i’m grateful to god for my family, for my inheritance, and in all my preliminary findings let me know that despite material posession i am rich, and i come from a line of warriors and healers. i agree with the psalmist who sings “the boundry lines have fallen for me in pleasant places”