So Will I Turn Her Virtue Into Pitch

Installation featuring looped performance film, screen, sand and pitch from Trinidad.

So Will I Turn Her Virtue Into Pitch (2026) engages with tattooing as a ritual and an offering to mark a connection with the Pitch Lake, the largest naturally occurring tar deposit in the world, located in Trinidad & Tobago.

Director, Editor, Tattoo Artist: Gesiye
Cinematographer: Mikhail Gibbings
Aerial Cinematographer: Stefan Chenko
Production Assistant: Kamali Martin

“Gesiye's So Will I Turn Her Virtue Into Pitch (2026) touches the core of the expanded idea of the map. Her film lingers over Trinidad's Pitch Lake, the world's largest natural tar deposit, revealing a surface marked by ridges, planes and pools that recall the contours of a traditional map. Rather than treating the landscape as something to be surveyed from a dispassionate and impersonal birds-eye view that we so readily associate with the map-maker, Gesiye situates herself inside it, tattooing her bare legs upon the lake. The Pitch Lake has long been a site of extraction: first exploited under British colonial rule, its tar was used to waterproof ships and later to pave roads across the Empire, including many in London. The lake continually regenerates itself, making it seem untouched even as it is endlessly mined; a surface that keeps being extracted, while remaining a wellspring of spirit and belonging for those who live amongst it.

In this, there is a metaphor for the Black diasporic experience: the simultaneous endurance, renewal and external demand placed upon a body and a land. Gesiye extends this metaphor through the act of tattooing. The lines she inks onto her skin become a kind of map, marking her encounter with the place, charting sensations and memory, and offering a guide back to her own body. These markings hold her dual identity across countries, tracing a personal geography where heritage and movement overlay one another like shifting terrain.”

-Writing by curator Ellie Lachs for the group show, Anatomy of the Map.