Singing Softly

Singing Softly is a sculptural and multimedia installation that reflects on the complexity of home and the ways memory is inherited and echoed through the body across generations.

I ask: what stories we inherit without speaking? How do we recall them?

Sitting beside my abuela, and among kin both inherited and chosen, I’ve learned and reviewed fragments once left unspoken: resilience beside violence, movement beside paralysis, memories both cherished and wished forgotten. Through sculpture, sound, drawing, photography, and field recordings, I trace familial entanglements with sexual violence, colonial violence, and the gendered silences that shape what is said or not said. Returning to the forms of rejas and breeze blocks, I use them as a language for remembering and holding the echoes of those who came before me. Traces of family history, migration, and everyday life, alongside cultural lineages that include the Adinkra symbols of Ghana, carried across colonial slave routes. These forms became both barrier and threshold: protective, restrictive, and permeable, and part of remembering.

                      You hoped memory would get lost in the mountains 

                                                   But it returned in every form but words