Mirrored Reflections

Mirrored Reflections is a provocative visual storytelling of an annual intimate gathering of Black and Brown women immersed in animistic collective restorative rituals rooted in Afro-Indigenous eco-philosophies.

Mirrored Reflections is a provocative visual storytelling of the Annual Goddess River Healing  Retreat (AGRHR)—an annual intimate gathering of Black and Brown women immersed in animistic collective restorative rituals rooted in Afro-Indigenous eco-philosophies. Publicly engaging in communal ancestral emancipatory healing ceremonies, we decolonize space and indigenize our relationship to the land as spiritual autonomy reclamation and reparation. The images serve as mirrors and portals to the raw, authentic, and unapologetic beauty of healing through participatory art.

As a social practice spiritual artist, I work within the framework of Allan Kardec’s philosophical, scientific, and moral tenets of Spiritism. As a Black woman born to Caribbean parents, the practice of Spiritism is as inherited as a grandmother’s kallaloo recipe.

But, how did we get to Kardec’s Spiritism?

In response to colonists’ raping, pillaging, and the violent forcing of monotheistic religions, specifically Catholicism, upon Black and indigenous folx of the Caribbean and diaspora, we’ve adopted the white table—a synchronizing of Kardec’s framework with our African and Indigenous philosophies—as an urgent, yet ingenious effort to retain and keep alive our sacred practices under oppressive and brutal systems, finding new ways to exist on foreign lands, amongst foreign settlers, and in foreign times. 

My white table praxis is a synthesis of the colorful, diverse, and multifaceted threads that make up my spiritual and artistic fabric. This practice guides me in holding communal spaces for Black and Brown women, honoring their own inherited ancestral forms of political and cultural resistance. Returning back to community, back to land, and back to indigenous spiritual technologies is a repatriation of culture, values and memories. In a polycrisis of the stripping of bodily autonomy, subjugation, and violence against women and girls, this work is crucial to our existence. Our worlds have ended many times, and we’ve had to decide how to live again.

In the ideation of the AGRHR, the gathering of our collective lineages is the apothecary I pull from to meet the needs of 70+ women, each year, for the past 7 years. By creating a safe space to reconnect with land and ritual, many of us rediscover belonging to our bodies, belonging to one another in community, and belonging as our ancestors’ wildest dreams. Witnessing, we find our sisters’ reflections and the medicine that has been made from our pain. 

Mirrored Reflections tells the stories we hold within our identities, stories of girls becoming women, family migration, race, and ethnicity written on our skin. With an open heart and ethical eye, photographer Jenee Williams beautifully documents the AGRHR’s collective ceremonies. As a social practice spiritual artist, I am honored to have Williams' artistry immortalize the community participatory art of the AGRHR. The captivating images of Mirrored Reflections bear witness to the power of Black and Brown women reimagining, reawakening, and returning to self. Our story becomes an archipelago of a resilient ecosystem, evoking the power to face any crisis, turning every poison into an antidote.

Mirrored Reflections is enshrined as a forthcoming photography book and installation as a solo exhibition.