Design Center Post-Bacculaurette Fellow Khepera Lyons-Clark presents:
Reaching: a journey through earth as archive
Thursday, May 15 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM
What does it look like for descendants of enslaved people have a healing and reciprocal relationship with American soil? Is a relationship that is built on reciprocity possible?
Rooted in the Beechwood neighborhood of Virginia beach, one of the earliest neighborhoods settled by free Black people, where my grandmother was raised and where my great-aunts live, this exhibition is a personal excavation into my understanding of my ancestry and their relationship to the Earth on which they lived and labored. Through sound, video, textiles, and material storytelling, I engage with Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation to imagine and reconstruct histories that archives cannot fully hold.
The exhibition and performance concludes with an intimate, invitation-only community discussion that invites reflection on personal connections to land and the ancestral practices we inherit.