Lakisha Apostel

I'm anticipating the bite of an ant.

I welcome the brown to rest under my finger nails.

I wish to call the collection of tiny rocks and other things mother and to mean that.

The soil is the beginning, the mother and the belly. Displacement is a state that the body is in. In this state the body is lost, not bound to anything, a wanderer in a constant state of unwilling errantry. My graduation work "We Shared a Belly" is rooted in these parallel assertions. 

My strategy is to make tools out of clay, tools which act as incisions in the soil so that the body can be reintroduced to the belly. This artistic methodology aims to address the topic of uprootedness, a subject that deeply resonates with me as a person from Curaçao grappling with the remnants of a displaced ancestry. I use performance to enact a ritual towards belonging, where the performers insert themselves back into the soil with curiosity and care,  morphing with it, taking their time with it, playing with it and caressing all that is the belly. I feel that this ritual gives language to the unspoken history of displacement in Curaçao, and creates a link between body, place and the feeling of uprootedness that hasn’t existed before. This embodied ritual begins to heal the historic rapture and reach into that void.