A Visual Manifesto: Rituals for Repair
A Visual Manifesto: Rituals for Repair is a three-channel film installation projected onto black cotton weavings inspired by African American quilting motifs, specifically three variations of the Log Cabin pattern. This work honors Black femme lineages and enacts a ceremonial call for spiritual and cultural reparations. Each film centers a ritual of care, protection, and remembrance, unfolding across different regions of the United States—Oakland, Tucson, and West Virginia on the Appalachian trail —and featuring Black women artists, healers, and mothers engaged in acts of reclamation.
In Oakland, amara t. smith and Courtney Desiree Morris perform a sensual, movement-based ritual in communion with the Earth as ancestor, calling on the land to teach us how to remember. In Tucson, Amber Doe and her mother, Iris Escalante, sweep the desert with handmade brooms, clearing space for rest and reflection while speaking to the intergenerational toll of care labor. In West Virginia, Tsedaye Makonnen and Alisha B. Wormsley invoke the return of the Cosmic Mother, reading from The Great Cosmic Mother and performing rituals that connect earthly repair to celestial balance.
The installation reinterprets the manifesto form as a living agreement: a vow to keep each other safe, to care for the land, to repair our bodies, and to honor our ancestors. The black weavings serve as spiritual armor and portals, embodying a desire to rematriate and awaken the cosmic weavers—Ix Chel, Aunt Nancy, Nuit, and the Nommo—whose stories guide us toward liberation. This is a prayer and a promise: repair begins with us.
Chapter 5: Aditi 36
Chapter 5: Aditi 36 excerpt from film children of NAN: Mothership. Mothership focuses on what it is to be a black mother in America.
Children of NAN is an archive of objects, photos, video footage, films, sounds, philosophies, myths, rituals, and performances that I have been compiling for over a decade to document the ways black women care for themselves, each other, and the earth. NAN is the most-used syllable for mother across African dialects.
A collaboration between Alisha Wormsley and Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson
Alisha Wormsley's Children of NAN Archive. Children of NAN is an archive of objects, photos, video footage, films, sounds, philosophies, myths, rituals, and performances that I have been compiling for over two decades to document the ways black women care for themselves, each other, and the earth.
Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson's Black Body White Noise audio work. “BLACKBODY, WHITE NOISE" (2021) is an experimental radio art composition by Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson. For an entire week Robinson collected sounds using two vacant cast iron cubes and sound reproduction technology.
Children of NAN: Mothership: The Archives
Chapter 3 from Children of NAN: Mothership, In this chapter we see the “archive” that is played for the experiments repeatedly for conditioning.
Children of NAN is an archive of objects, photos, video footage, films, sounds, philosophies, myths, rituals, and performances that I have been compiling for over two decades to document the ways black women care for themselves, each other, and the earth. NAN is the most-used syllable for mother across African dialects.
House/Full Black Women - The Last Episode (excerpt)
House/Full of Blackwomen is a multi-site/media, ritual dance theater project addressing the displacement, well-being and sex-trafficking of black women and girls in Oakland. Created by amara tabor-smith with director Ellen Sebastian Chang and a collective of Black women artists, abolitionists. Set in various public sites throughout Oakland over a seven-year period (2015-2023) “How can we, as black women and girls find space to breathe, and be well within a stable home?” Film by Alisha B Wormsley commissioned by amara tabor-smith
Spirit
A series of gestures that I see as a metaphor for the power of Black Women from the children of NAN archive.
Conjuring
When existence is [in]formed by death one must conjure out of form to survive. This is the craft of spirituality inspired by the SIBYLS (then and now and soon). This work is a dialogue between black woman and environment. The specifics of the environment are insignificant. Informed by collapse and time.
To survive, one must know space.
I dream about black women.
How we are constantly informed by our nature. This nature encourages an understanding out of form. This form comes from the void to help us remember.
So. What is “erasure” and what is a “conjuring” – and how might those lines overlap?
How attached can we be in these interspaces? Even the space of body. There is repetition, returning again and again to a place to (re)build. What conjuring is used? What story is told? Not just to survive but strive.
Slaves and Indians
Slaves and Indians is a land and blood acknowledgment.
This ritual can be performed at any location on this colonized Earth, pre-determined or intuitively reached, although the first performances were installed within and without the walls of Art institutions in the United States of America (i.e. The Museum of Modern Art NYC and the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center.) These institutions and the many to follow along Harris and Wormsley’s idyllic ‘Trail of Un-Tears’, represent for the artists opportunities to reverse the larceny of culture, wealth, spirit, life, and identity, and return these values back to the Earth and bodies from which the system of white supremacy has pillaged and benefited from for far too long. Harris and Wormsley are repeatedly highlighting that environmental justice initiatives must be realized with land back advancements centering Black and Indigenous stewards of the world.
In process: Activations and Portals
Li Harris and Alisha B Wormsley
This work derived from a Li Harris project: D.R.E.A.M. = A Way to AFRAM (Diffraction + Restoration + Electromagnetic Analogue of Mass = A Way to AFRAM). Harris invited Wormsley to workshop some ways of activating portals to safe space for Black folks. This is a result (in process) of that work. It is through the work and research that Harris and Wormsley will try to ascend to AFRAM, an inner space reality for Black exponential potential of Being. To do this Harris and Wormsley establish a series of portals through site-specific field work in international and national topographical locations. Above: 15 minute film workshop of opening three portals: Colorado, Utah and Massechussets.
EXTINCTION
This video is about extinction. 2014