The Wound is a Portal
Now Open at the National Museum of Wales
From August 2022 to January 2025
This offering is a portal
through which shared joy forms a bridge
to personal and collective liberation.
The Wound is a Portal is an interdisciplinary, social practice work that uses tattooing, performance and storytelling to facilitate healing. Set in Trinidad, this intergenerational work explores the impact of colonialism and slavery on the Black Diaspora’s relationship with the land. The installation includes eight participant portraits, one looped tattoo animation and a short film that is eleven minutes and eleven seconds long.
In The Wound is a Portal, I use Afro-diasporic healing modalities to address generational trauma and weave a mythology of land and personhood. Asking specifically about the manifestations of trauma in Black communities in post-colonial Trinidad, and looking at our patterns of relationship with the land, this work seeks to create a Portal or space for unearthing, processing and tending to collective pain.
Eight Black Trinidadians between the ages of 19 and 78 were invited to participate in a process that included tattoos and a series of conversations about family histories, belonging and connection to the land. Participants received a tattoo outdoors and spent time forming relationships with each other and creating art together over four months. I envision the tattooing process as a ritual that is both transformative and empowering, facilitating a reclamation of agency and acting as a portal to re-connection with self, with each other and with the land. The final work is an offering: part documentation, part mythology of the island; it includes interviews with participants, dance and writing as an ode to belonging.
The Wound is a Portal was commissioned by Amgueddfa Cymru, the National Museum of Wales, and is a part of their national collection. This work was created in collaboration with musicians, designers, filmmakers, photographers and eight volunteers from across the island who met through this experience.
Thank you to everyone who supported and participated in this work.
Participants: Robbie Price, Safiya Hoyte, Adam ‘Mar’ Andrews, Alicia Viarruel, Dawn-Marie Alexander, Kevon Samuel, Nadine Marshall-Joseph, Joan Ballantyne; Production Manager: Lisa-Marie Brown; Production Assistant: Neisha Rahamut; Researcher: Timiebi Souza-Okpofabri; Interviewer: Tracy Assing; Stylist: Suelyn Choo; Composer: Omar Jarra; Location Sound Recordist: Jelani Serette; Director of Photography: Mikhail Gibbings; 2nd Camera Operator: Aviel Scanterbury; Drone Camera Operator: Renaldo Celestine Matamoro; 2nd Drone Camera Operator: Avery Smart; Designers: Meiling & Kaleen Salois; Colour Grader: Shane Hosein; & Special Thanks to Maia Nunes, Rheanna Chen, Melanie Archer, Bunty & Rory O’Connor, Justin Koo, Stephanie Roberts, Nicholas Thornton, Pomegranate Studios, Nigel & Debbie Souza-Okpofabri, Eileen & Vernon Phipps, Urban Hudlin, Ancestors Known & Unknown, The Land.
