Photo Series by Kierra Davvon Branker

“Losslessness…Trying to find togetherness. Recollect my thoughts on my extension of self. Release virtual and physical. Earth. Space. Celestial parts, embedded in our being. 

Mothers carry our stars. When I get there… will I be ready? Feeling new, in an unfamiliar place. Roots dug through in homes we kept.

Despite the minds of those who have tried to deny our existence. Rapturous laughter held with those who believe in opaqueness.

Our existence, constant resistance, brings change.

Where do we find a home? Is it from where we come from or to where we go? Is it within ourselves? “


Project Statement

____________________________________________________

Get It And Come Back”, is an extension of Black visual language and personal history. The relationship I have with the works starts from home, as my parents are from Trinidad, a country in the Caribbean. The cultural artifacts seen in my childhood were evident in the music, food, and forms of dress my parents left for me. My surroundings both in and outside my home influenced my upbringing in the States. Growing up in a West Indian home, yet exposed to Black American culture has allowed me to see both sides and how they interact through my lived experience.  In this context, cultural artifacts, social spaces, and heirlooms become catalysts for uncovering the truths and myths within ourselves.

My practice draws into the objects that help to ground our place in this world. In these last 5 years, I have been exploring the relationship between object and body and how these are activated by one's history, gestures, and cultural traditions. Utilizing photographic techniques I began to create portraits, by putting my focus on my friends and family of the Caribbean diaspora. Together we constructed images in intimate spaces while creating work that parallels my own experience of the heritage of a distant home. 

Cities in America have helped to host Black Caribbean immigrants, allowing them to create community and a new legacy. Today, these cultural hubs for Afro-Caribbean peoples are woven within the North American landscape.  In this project, I aim to investigate further the nature of being in Caribbean American homes. As well as noting the evidence of West African Adinkra symbolism that represents the subtleties as well as the vitality of the thread that links the diaspora as a whole. 

Overall this series documents the ways in which memories and keepsakes become a part of ourselves in our own mythmaking. These memories and family practices travel intergenerationally, and through them, the thread of our diasporic legacy continues. The fractal retelling of the “myth of home” allows the work to subvert major social themes of environmentalism, colonialism, gender, and racial structures. In both the physical and the conceptual meaning of home, we can achieve restoration of our memories, bloodlines, and origins.