Prototype for Clarity and Extraordinary Alien (Descriptive Statement)

creative contribution

mujero

artist statement

When I started working with Air Jordans, I was thinking about my childhood experience with sneaker culture and the ways it provided a script for men to follow and relate to one another, though I did not feel like I could match a certain gender performance that was expected of me. Deconstructing the shoes allows the psychological process of reconciling my oneness with, and difference from, the world I grew up in. I want to change how these shoes can exist in the world; maybe, in a way, I could exist with them outside of the gender expectations that were attached to them.

Through conversations with curator and writer Serubiri Moses, I have related the work to diasporic religions, Santeria specifically. Though I am not a practitioner, the practice holds much influence in my family in the Dominican Republic and diasporically, through music, through colloquialisms, and sometimes through spiritual practices. We spoke about how some Afro-Indigenous faith traditions interpolated Catholic iconography introduced through colonial expansion into something completely unique. It is taking what you have, as broken and ugly as it is, and making something new again. Jordans are a mass-produced object turned cultural icon, and this work is another round of transformation. I take them apart, I make them one again.

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