The Flow of Things

Through collage and archival imagery, I explore ancestral memory and healing from colonial visual trauma. By reimagining historical narratives, my work creates space for silenced emotions and experiences, inviting viewers to feel and see differently.

Decolonizing Visual Narratives: A Photographic Exploration of History, Imagination, and Collective Healing

The intersection of history and imagination has long been a fertile ground for exploration in visual storytelling. This work series emerges from a deep emotional resonance with ancestral memories and a burning desire to heal from colonial visual trauma. By leveraging open-access image archives and my photography, this project challenges dominant visual representations of the past while creating space for the raw emotions and lived experiences that conventional archives often silence.

The digital age has precipitated a significant transformation in the visual landscape, characterized by the proliferation of digital documentation and image archives. While this shift has expanded possibilities for visual storytelling, it has also perpetuated colonial ways of seeing and feeling. These visual archives often reflect and reproduce colonial wounds, embedding hierarchies of power that dictate what we see and how we feel about what we see.

Drawing inspiration from ongoing efforts to decolonize various humanities disciplines, this project aims to reconceptualize the emotional and aesthetic foundations of visual narratives. It emerges from a place of epistemic disobedience – challenging not only what we know, but how we feel about what we know. The methodology involves an emotionally engaged critical practice with open-access image archives, unraveling past narratives while honoring the feelings of grief, rage, joy, and hope that emerge in this process. This approach acknowledges that decolonial healing requires us to feel differently about images, moving beyond the colonial myth of detached observation.

The project employs collage as its primary medium, drawing from arts- based research methodologies and indigenous ways of feeling-knowing. This technique allows for the expression of complex emotional states by juxtaposing multiple visual elements, creating a space where collective trauma and healing can coexist. By embracing alternative sensibilities and emotional vocabularies, the work contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonize visual culture, reclaiming not just agency but also the right to feel and express differently.

Ultimately, this work demonstrates the transformative potential of bringing together intellectual critique and emotional restoration through artistic practice. It offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between history, imagination, and visual representation, while creating space for the full spectrum of feelings that emerge when we confront and heal from colonial visual legacies. Through this emotional-aesthetic approach, viewers are invited to not just see differently, but to feel differently about the past and its living presence in our lives.

Works are archival pigment ink prints on rag paper. Sizes are different from 20x30cm up to 90x120cm.