2018, 34 minute performance (4-minute excerpt)

A collaborative exercise of emotional labor.

Audience members are invited to watch and/or participate in the spelling of names from people killed by police and gun violence. The work provides a space of remembrance, healing and action through a familiar American school tradition.

This version of the Spelling Bee was held in the RISD Museum’s Metcalf Auditorium in Providence, RI. It started with one speller and aimed to acquire more contestants form the audience as time went on. Only one other person volunteered to join the stage as a speller, while the rest of the audience chose to remain seated. The names read by the announcer were pulled from factual news stories and real people. There was no penalty for spelling a name wrong. No winners were declared.

Cinematography by Tristan Hsu

Full video of the performance available upon request.

2018, 7 minutes (2-minute excerpt)

Full version of video available upon request.

2018

Human hair, polymer clay, hand-stitched assorted fabrics, polyester fiberfill.

These dolls were used in organized playdates to examine how young children classify racial identity and ambiguity through narrative play.

2018

This is an ongoing collaborative experiment between my handmade Happy Mulatto Dolls and local youth.

By facilitating play sessions and allowing different children to interact with these dolls, I’m interested in observing how younger groups of people casually label and analyze certain bodies and racial traits. 

Through multiple iterations, the playdates aim to explore what happens when children have complete physical and creative control over female bodies (especially when they are not explicitly coded as white or black). 

2017

Live Performance at the RISD Museum

During one of the RISD Museum's Third Thursday events, I pretended to be a museum docent and held a gallery-talk on Charles Cordier's "African Venus". The talk was given exclusively in Portuguese while I addressed a group of empty seats. Part formal analysis and part critique, it addressed the struggle of attaining visibility for marginalized bodies in elite and creative spaces.  

2018

The newest pseudo-factual non-profit targeting the Father Absence Crisis in the United States.

2017

10 minute participatory performance.

This performance draws from pre-school learning, student-teacher dynamics, and the oppressive potential of language. 

Taking the role of a teacher, I invited six volunteers to engage in a call-and-response activity where I required them to read back to me two different cue cards: "that girl is thick" and "thank you". 

Through forced repetition,  the performance questioned howthe classroom, authority figures, and students often play a role in shaping violence and fetishization onto female bodies of color. 

2017. Ongoing collage series. 

2017, Experimental Animation 

**Please contact to request a private link to the film**

My Other Half is a film that explores inter-generational and cross-cultural views on racial identity between a white mother and her biracial daughter. They both examine what one has to gain or lose from being in an interracial relationship. Narrated in Portuguese with English subtitles.

2017. Motion sensors and found materials

"Minha terra tem palmeiras onde canta o sabiá. As aves que aqui gorjeiam não gorjeiam como lá."

A generic, vividly colored toy that represents no particular species flies carelessly and quietly while trapped in an artificial sky. When a human crosses its path, it freezes and suddenly begins to sing a song by the Italian composer, Domenico Zipoli, who traveled to the Jesuit Missions in San Ignacio, Argentina to convert the Guarani people to Catholicism. The bird sings this song in the pitch of the Sabiá, the national bird of Brasil. By pulling elements from different regions that are slightly related but still very different, the piece calls to mind the image of a hybrid trinket that plays into the homogenization of Latin American identity and western tourist culture. 

Photography by Paula Gaetano-Adi, Video by Alejandro Borsani, Modeled by Margarette Barry

2016

2016

A series documenting off-season municipal swimming pools in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island.

2016

Selected spreads from a 30 paged printed "Grammar Book" on the failures of education systems and language during childhood.