a place to call home 001
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home was not always a place. i moved around a lot and so home was an idea that i carried with me with one on the clock. i knew my time there would be short-lived, no matter how long the stay. making home in the corners of these spaces was how i quieted the chaos and found moments of calm.
last year, i started my youtube as “the moody minimalist,” a moniker i had created for myself back in circa 2015. i would find shelter in that name, as i began to make home for myself out of grad school. i began to learn a few things about myself while navigating housing insecurity and the weight of determining what to keep and what to let go. i slowly began to want my home to embody:
a kind of minimal living that does not mean white or whiteness. my home can reflect the joy and ancestry of my blackness — neutral should not mean “white” in the aesthetic nor political sense of the word. that’s where the “moody” came into play.
a minimalism steeped in an ethic of eco-consciousness by assessing the sources of what i buy and my ability to care for its end of life.
a commitment to anti-consumerism and buying black, woman, and small-owned, and re-homing pre-owned things when i can.
a minimalism about making space for rest and beauty in order to find the joy, peace, and art in intentionally creating negative spaces that draw the eye to celebrate each moment.
my early videos showcased the first home i made with my now wife in our apartment in the bronx. since then we’ve purchased our first house together, and home is taking on an even deeper meaning for me as i stretch my limbs across hard wood floors from the 1930s and look out my window to see where my garden will be.
now as i think about my relationship to this land, this house, and the journey that brought me here, “the moody minimalist” no longer feels like it could hold the expansiveness and complexity of my desire to be a steward both of self and the land. it was through a serious meditation that a refrain i had written began to echo in my head — home is how i heal. the phrase immediately seemed to hold the ecology of creating a home in relationship to the past, the land, and care that extends across self and community.
so*, home is how i heal* will be a visual diary on learning to make living an art, softly and sustainably. i’m excited to continue my journey of storytelling through my writing accompanied by my photography and short films — mediums i’m eager to delve into more intentionally —, as i journey to create a home that honors my queer black existence in new york, learn how to grow food, build community, practice existing and new rituals and recipes, and re-home my sense of self and care.
this is a new offering from my studio citation studio, to share a much more intimate side of my practice that is also deeply rooted in memory, nature, and infrastructures of care and technology that are ancestral and folk.
i am increasingly lessening my engagement on instagram but while i’m there follow me @citation.studio or visit my work-in-progress website citation.studio.
citations
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
»The word ecology is derived from the greek oikos, the word for home«
»On a day-to-day basis, my personal freedom doesn’t come from money per se—it mostly comes from having a home where these infrastructural systems are built into the walls…
But the real difference between money and infrastructural systems as general-purpose providers of freedom is that money is individual and our infrastructural systems are, by their nature, collective. If municipal water systems mean that we are enduringly connected to each other through the landscape where our bodies are, our other systems ratchet this up by orders of magnitude.«