Makini: Transitions into Terrestrial

Positioned at the base of the furthest extended toe of a body of new work, I am remembering how discomforting it is to be at the start of something. Traveling backwards into the darkness of the unknown, my eyes regarding the hazy fullness of the past, I am asking my eyes to trust the rest of my sensorial body. Of this body that relies so heavily on sight, I ask for trust in the truth that my eyes do not contain the most important sense in this moment. It is a moment of saying goodbye to over a decade of thought and practice and movement, of powerful communities of collaborators, of finding ourselves in places in which we ought not to be, of learning how to belong and to be belonged to. It is also a moment of wondering what it is that I even believe anymore about the notion of belonging.

As I archive a decade’s worth of work centered around Black majorette performance, I turn my attention to the ground that holds the bodies that shimmy over top of it. In a new body of work, tentatively titled terrestrial, I am most curious about we, humans, as Earth, as opposed to on the Earth, or with the Earth. I am making proposals for the range of methods with which we can deal with the vastness of time — far beyond the containers of white supremacy and settler colonialism, and possibly beyond their antecedents, and the antecedents of those antecedents. How do these bodies already contain the epic and the unforeseen of the planet? What does that have to do with how we seek expertise in the forms that we create?