Project Backdrop: 

While the ideation and execution of this project began in 2019; Homecoming unfolded, was shaped, influenced, and coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic over the course of 2020.

The pandemic began with a deafening silence of the initial shut down and stay-at-home orders. Schools and workplaces closed overnight with everyone sent home until further notice. The shelves of grocery stores were bare as people went into a panic buying water, toilet paper, and canned goods in hopes of surviving the mysterious virus sweeping the globe. For the first time in my life, most of society was forced to pause, be still, and reflect on the terror of the unknown. Hospitals were overcrowded and under resourced with no hope of a cure or vaccine on the horizon. Throughout the world millions of people died. Their loved ones were unable to fully grieve or process as people were forced to isolate and could not gather in community to mourn or heal.

Heaviness, sorrow, and anger blanketed the summer air surrounding the murder of George Floyd. His murder sparked protests and civil unrest across the nation against racism and police brutality all over the country. API hate grew exponentially as innocent Asian elders and community members were demeaned, attacked, and killed in the streets and their homes. White supremacist groups led one terror attack after the other on BIPOC communities with Trump pouring fuel on the fire of hatred in their hearts. The structures of every major system broke open to reveal the sickness of systemic racism and enormous inequity gaps that disproportionally impacted the BIPOC community. Even the earth cried out with scorching heat waves and devastating fires.

During this time my hair was in its growing stages. I had personal hardship, loss, death, and pain. I was raw and broken daily from the sorrow & rage of the pandemic outside and heartache and grieving I processed inside. All these layers have a place in this work that cannot be untangled.

Project Statement:

Homecoming is a performative project that explores the body as a vessel for radical self-healing and liberation from systems of oppression. Oppression starts with rules, standards, and laws that work together to create systems that suppress individual and collective freedoms. Healing starts with identifying and properly treating the wounds.

Female presenting bodies are violated at an early age with both direct / indirect rules and standards of what is acceptable / unacceptable as set by societal expectations, the industry of capitalism, and white colonial ideals. These rules and standards are then enforced in school, in the workplace, in community, in religion, and in the nuclear family. The society I was born and raised in was/is also anti-fat, anti-queer, white supremist, and essentially antithetical to my existence. Society has rules and standards for the very hair fibers of my being. The hair on my head that I spent my life trying to style, color, cut, and tame. The hair on my face that I had spent thousands of dollars to remove in every violent manor but continually came back dark and thick like my ancestors before me. Even the hair on my toes that I would shave in the summer as not to detract or disgust. I tweezed, waxed, lasered, shaved, cut, plucked, sugared, and chemically removed the hair on my body for decades to try to fit a Western ideal of beauty that was never meant to include me. Even when clumps of hair would fall out from stress and depression would set in, I strived to be enough, to be accepted- despite my body and spirit telling me, enough. Anxiously controlling the hair on my body would never turn me into the thin white girls I grew up looking at in magazines and movies.

Over the course of 2020 I grew out the hair all over my body and challenged my idea of self and self-worth. I grew hair everywhere on my body for the first time since puberty. I faced a natural version of myself when I looked down and in the mirror. My mustache grew in, my pubes grew out and I sat with the discomfort and listened. Why was something as natural as hair so controversial? Why was I uncomfortable and anxious in my own body? I questioned every belief I had about my brown, hairy, fat, queer body and decided which beliefs had the privilege of staying. I slowly quieted my inner critic who was taught to hate myself through social conditioning and worked to accept, embrace, and love my body in ways I was never taught. I challenged the male gaze. I confronted and debated my own unconscious biases. I peeled back the internalized hatred and shame from societal, media generated, and familial pressures from the inside out. Each layer was another scab being ripped off to expose the delicate and raw flesh of agency and autonomy beneath. I rejected the messages of patriarchy, white supremacy, anti-fatness, anti-queerness and any molds that were placed on me without my consent. I slowly decolonized my thoughts in relationship to myself, my hair, and my body; dismantling the internalized systems of oppression.

After a year of painful and redemptive growth, on the winter solstice of 2020 I constructed a stage of stone, dirt, and mirrors in the Joshua Tree, California desert on Serrano & Shoshone Lands. I stood nude at center stage, razor in hand, and shaved my body methodically from the soles of my feet to the top of my crown. The sun witnessed this act and gently illuminated my body while it slowly moved and set across the desert sky.  A “shedding of the past to make room for a revolutionary new age.[1]” By twilight, the socially constructed layers embodied in the hair fibers of my being had all fallen to the earth.

I stood with nothing and everything all at once, reborn. A homecoming.

[1] Chani Nicholas, astrologer, author, & activist.