La Négresse blanche (2020)

The Graft series explores how subjects modify and manipulate their bodies to straddle (ab)normality. The series communicates how a Black subject, determined from without and defined by all she is not, actively participates in her own transformation – a metamorphosis represented by the adoption or removal of a new layer of skin.

La Négresse blanche is a six hour performance art piece that marks the beginning of my Graft series. The piece is titled after Mayotte Capecia’s book of the same name and draws off of selections from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. The piece is meant to illustrate the epidermalization of whiteness. If whiteness is contingent upon the destruction of Blackness, the Black body can only become white through its demise. A stripping of the skin, so to speak.

What happens when bodies renounce a Blackness they cannot escape to approach the asymptote of whiteness? How is the performance of whiteness worn (down)?