Selvage/Obsidian

e-flux journal #105, on Loophole of Retreat, 2019.

In Simone Leigh’s practice, bodies become buildings. Crania become carafes. Busts become dwellings. As she takes the black female form and reimagines its relationship to materiality, Simone turns Aimé Césaire’s classic equation—“colonization = thingification”— squarely on its head. Her body-objects, and their labile transformation from one form to another, act as a rejoinder to the old materialist conceit that we might imagine our selves and our lives as separate from the things around us: nonhuman beings, animate or not. Each vessel is a study in the process of our entanglement, a meditation on the registers of, possibilities for, and challenges of this in/human relation, produced not only through the violence of enduring coloniality, but also through the possibilities that black women’s labor makes manifest in our worlds…