Assia Drame

Following on from her dissertation topic, her research focuses on the esoteric use of fiction by Black and Indigenous artists. She assumes that this dynamic unfolds fractally through the use of cyber-technologies and bio-technologies of transmission, to challenge the colonial and social fractures still in order, and generate an order of symbiotic relations. In Azzeazy’s drawings, often installed in the ecosystem like soft, delicate sculptures, we can observe how emotions are exchanged, and attitudes embodied in subjective archetypal characters: she calls them Metafemmes. These Metafemmes immigrate from the dimension of the invisible to our material space in the form of intimate objects collected and then transformed, blending organic materials and plastic bodies. Often suspended far from walls, they hijack architecture, embracing a supple, elliptical space and, through the composition of their bodies, forming their own anarchitecture – in reference to the work of Gordon Matta Clark. They inhabit an interstice where time is no longer linear, but winds in an expansive spiral, as if remembering knowledge already initiated then forgotten, in order to regenerate psychosomatic wounds, like Octavia Butler’s Oankali creatures. Azzeazy connects traditional techniques such as etching and pastels with analog and digital programming technologies. Her written and visual poems illustrate a quantum mechanics that intimately intertwines the plasticity of celestial and living bodies.

My friend from Chicago accidentally called Lake Michigan “the Ocean”. Its immense waves caress the city from south to north like the binding of a book. Or rather, it’s the story of the city founded in Indigenous territory by the Haitian Jean-Baptiste DuSable, son of a slave mother, that’s written throughout this ocean novel. My first three-dimensional experiment, just before the covid, was an installation: a wave made up of plastic water bottles consumed by my relatives, and a telephone handset. According to Dr. Emoto, water conducts emotions, and by calling from this etheric cabin, we gain access to the guidance of our guardian-alters, our long-distance-spatio-temporal family. Some bottles contain a transparent liquid, plasma, others a red liquid, family, or as we say, blood. This toxic plastic structure mimics our organic make-up. This wave evokes an organ, and paradoxically contains life. Chicago is analogous to this paradox, its society containing a history and a musical and artistic life of the most vibrant, irrigated by anti-racist struggles, despite being structured by social violence with still toxic consequences. It has a global cultural impact, which is in itself a paradox, since it was created by minorities. It’s this fractal deployment of art and life, in a landscape that’s still fractured, that feeds my research, and whose actors I join.