How do we memorialize a moment that is still on going

How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?

Recently, I’ve leaned more heavily into creating abstracted spaces that engage sensation and experience, while using materials that dredge and code histories that require nuance to fully understand. These gestures question the sites where these histories occurred, the unseen performances that have taken place, and they ask us to assign value to what we may not know, but can feel.

In my sculpture How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing? (2022), two twin mattresses stand upright side by side. Housed within them are subwoofers playing an annotated version of Moneybagg Yo’s Me Vs Me, a Southern trap track. The subwoofers don’t blare treble; instead, they push low-frequency bass that is less “heard” than “felt.” The sound carries through the piece as weight. The mattresses compress like lungs under pressure. Their textured cloth shutters and heaves as if they are breathing, laboring, remembering.

I am thinking about how beds encode our lives—our performances, our bodies, our histories. We die on them, cry on them, fuck on them, heal on them, carry both pleasure and pain across their surfaces. And then they are discarded. In this work, the mattress holds sound like it holds the body, and I am asking: where, and when, are Black people allowed to rest?