Therianthropic Figures

Drexciya is inspired by the Detroit electronic music duo of the same name. Through electronic music and text on their album sleeves they created an underwater world. The origin story begins when women were thrown overboard slave ships due to the “commotion” they caused going into labour. These women were said to give birth to the first Drexciyans, a race of people that could breathe underwater. In the piece I depict the mythology and collaged together a “newspaper” that includes the text from Drexciya’s albums. The collage is a cutout of a squid, often thought to symbolise “making a fool of ones enemies”. The creatures at the bottom are my interpretation of Nommo, ancestral spirits of the Dogon people who were considered the first living creatures created by the sky god Amma. Nommo means “to make one drink” alluding to the drowning of the mother (an end) and the child breathing water (a beginning). I hoped to bring together the two cosmologies, African and diaspora.

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In Tryna Make a Way Out of No Way a black mermaid sits on a bed holding a pink telephone in her left hand and the horn of the African- American Private, Prince Simbo in her right. Who is she calling and how has she come to hold an object from the Revolutionary War? She’s dark, nearly the same colour of the shadowed walls behind her. She’s beautiful, almost smiling and certainly content. She’s in between worlds, like blackness itself in a liminal space of dislocation. Non- human, non- citizen, non- being. Not of this world but in this world, she offers us the power of invisibility. The ability to make worlds in worlds where we weren’t meant to exist. 

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 The Tides are Changing features a black queer ballerina as half Octupus. They are a deity with a scroll, giving an alternative narrative to the middle passage.

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