We, rainbow serpent, slither beyond the quiet zone
buzz beneath feet
screen sound-blink
draft pulls
clothes leftward
inward, arrival
eastern parkway opens its mouth and does not close
train is a thing to go to and fro
train is also a thing to go to and to and to and to and to
a snake of infinity if you gaze at it so
i do not know when the time bending began
tho the flow of bodies in this loop felt ancestral
ashe
parade goes
forward
parade goes
backward and
forward
and backward and
forward
west indian day parade says it so
street and sea
a place for
we
islands parade down the street
islands sharing one sea
eastern parkway for the west indies
just beyond the parade
the quiet zone
power declared over sound space
silence (police)
power declared over sound space
sound (we)
sound clash is a sound clash is a sound clash
counterlisten
i pulse behind you
i have always been this road
if you must rest, pass through
if you seek more
return to me
go back underground and return
descend
buzz beneath the feet
bass memory
held note released
the parade boards
Bass memory 0902
bass in bones on train on way home
these bones drunk
tree trunk
core
sunlight kisses sweat
glitter dust pollen scales
one stop back
two stops
core
ride toward it as they rode away
train is the fold
time bends back on itself
gives you more
if you look at it so
chorus again
costume shimmer
fluorescent light
music leaks from phone
bones sway
eyes close
moving faintly
still on
parkway
still on
parade is not over, rainbow serpent
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090390 090291 090792 090693 090594 090495 090296 090197 090798 090699
090400 090301 090202 090103 090604 090505 090406 090307 090108 090709
090610 090511 090312 090213 090114 090715 090516 090417 090318 090219
… …
090522 090423 090224 090125
090726
Artist Statement
Does land seek our ears? I offer mine. My hands scribe the encounter. This is the core inquiry of my Land Vocalization (2022–) series of which We, rainbow serpent, slither beyond the quiet zone (2026) and Bass memory 0902 (2026) are a part.
A crosspollinated practice of land listening, urban polyphony, and queered traveler’s diary, the drawings in this series are pulses transmitted from land to paper, a drop in the ocean of collective memory. I am interested in excavating drawing’s capacity for kinship with all life. Words enter to capture what the drawing knows but does not say. Together they reach toward an account the present has not yet made room for.
Beginning in motion, hand bouncing unsteady along a train’s slither. Bone conducts what the ear misses. Dashes mark bodies darting in and out of subway cars, words overheard. Birds overhead, lines trace the connections and separations between bodies, species, and communities. Pigeon looking for a place to rest, spike. I note the new metal partitions adorning subway turnstile. Sore back, leaning bench. Land speaks, life unfolds.
I work from within the mycelial understory of African artistic traditions where art is fundamentally woven into collective life, as interconnected and load-bearing as the fascial web beneath the skin, holding disparate parts in living relation. As the child of Ethiopian immigrants, raised between Addis Ababa and Silicon Valley, attuned to digital and capital ecosystems and their required displacement and extraction, I trace what forms of expression have endured our collective stewardship. My work probes into the friction between what has been taken, what persists, and new coexistences.
