Cartography
'Cartography' is a fifteen minute live performance in which I drag myself through flour, chilli powder, and curry powder.
Curry powder, flour, and chilli powder serve as material representatives for the three regions that have come to formulate my cultural identity—Canada, Texas, and Trinidad. The food bases are associated with the foods I ate growing up in relation to my Canadian and Trinidadian heritage as well as my Texan upbringing. The colours of the materials correspond to the colours of the land which they represent: flour, the same hue as the whiteness of ground in the dead of winter in Canada; chili, a colour similar to the pink clay soil I remember digging into as a child in the backyard in Texas; and curry, a tone matching the golden sand along the shores of some of my favourite beaches in Trinidad. I reflect on these colours in relation to the ways race is affiliated with exaggerated hues of flesh tones, i.e. my white father, brown mother, and red (a term used in Trinidad for mixed race persons) self.
'Cartography' navigates viewers through an unorthodox scene of reductive culinary representations of varied cultures being blended and marinated on my body. The blending of food powders serves as a metaphorical stand in for haunting recipes of my racialised experiences being brought to the family table.