Where The Line is Drawn
The Windward Passage connects to the Old Bahama Bank. These are the appendages of the sea that separate two lands- Haiti from the Bahamas- that I think of as being geographically home. Thinking about the ocean as a wall, I attempted to empty it in Where The Line is Drawn (2020). These two straits needed to cease existing in order to mend the trauma of my displacement and the fractured foreign relations between Haiti and the Bahamas. I displace twenty-five gallons of seawater as a gesture towards emptying the ocean. A looped video is projected onto an acrylic tank displayed on a metal pedestal that references ships next to ceramic vessels that I cast.
How does our understanding of the seas reinforce our logic around real estate and the production of geopolitical identity? I later read Where the Line is Drawn by Raja Shehadeh which coincidentally carried the same title of this work and many of its poetics around land, migration, and placelessness