Jan 4, 2024 —❋— 9:42 am

Charlyn/Magdaline Griffith/Oro responds to Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman

From a series of works I am calling “A Provenance; Or I own myself outright and do not care to acquire you. Just a few artefacts of what has happened will do.” This bust is called “NHI” and the accounting featured here with the many cowries represent the stories of those we don’t have names for, that needed acknowledgment for what they influenced, built and/ or saved. For the women and femmes who made influential company of those in power. Their names and faces erased from documented memory, but whose energy I can tell is present in the best parts of what has survived in the legacies of men.

Charlyn/Magdaline Griffith/Oro examines communication between the dead & the living and the unborn. They are a researcher and artist/activist creating performance, objects & imagery as rituals for strengthening the potency of Black & Indigenous memory & imagination. They currently participate in the Chronicling Resistance fellowship with the Philadelphia Area Special Collections Libraries focusing on migration between the Arawak islands (so called West Indies) and Lenapehoking (so called Philadelphia).