Breathe
This film set out to explore how a wooden cabin, which is ubiquitous in the American South, can hold a multitude of meanings for people who are positioned at the margins of societies. In the same way that the descendant of enslaved people saw an old cabin in which her enslaved ancestors once lived as a home, I am uplifted by a cabin built from a kit to house art I have made to survive historical joy and pain. My findings are this: 1) storytelling is important for the often silenced and people who descend from communities who have faced great emotional-historical harm across time and space; 2) video and film are great methods to help survivors of across time struggles to tell their own stories; 3) community building is possible when we share our stories and art. Indeed, a week after I shared a “Breathe” installation featuring art I have made since 2011 with a few friends, I took small wooden blocks to New York City so little kids could decorate them as a homage to Zora Neale Hurston, the African American anthropologist-folklorist-writer and subject of one of my recent books. Hurston once lived in a cabin she fixed up in Jim Crow Florida. She was not permitted to buy it because she was black. A story thusly circles back on itself and is recoverable. She inspires me and many others.