ARCHIVES + MEMORY + MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION
WHAT HAPPENED TO _______?
DESCRIPTION
Continuing my artistic and scholarly inquiries into the question of history, who decides, and the construction of memory, I was drawn to another historical circumstance of omission: The story of Henrietta Lacks. The story has made headlines due to the pursuit of the family of Henrietta Lacks to receive some compensation on her behalf. The HeLa cells, as they were named posthumously, were taken and utilized without consent, replicated to the size of more than 100 times the Empire State Building.
What Happened To _______? tells the story of the HeLa Cells, and by proxy the story of Henrietta Lacks from three different perspective:
a) the machine (Modern Medicine)
b) the product (HeLa Cells)
c) the origin (Henrietta Lacks)
Using theatrical inspired staging and lighting, video, machine learning, sound art, and video reactive sound composition, this multiroom installation connects the nodes of Henrietta’s story, giving voice and body in resistance of objection.
This work is a provocation that asks questions about consent, autonomy, and the violent virality of racial capitalism. Moreover, it exists as a spatialized sensorial interrogation of the mechanisms that create obscurity, erasure, and the construction of history.
This work was inspired by my scholarly and artistic research into Saidiya Hartman’s theory of Critical Fabulation, as well as Kim Gallon’s essay, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities”.