SANCOFA
Sancofa, Latex and Spray Paint Interior Mural 2020
The title of this piece is “Sancofa.” Listen below to hear me explain what was in my mind when I created this mural and check out the paired playlist that was the background sound for the creative.
This piece is about looking home. I’ll be very blatantly honest, and say, I’m not from Ghana, and there is a chance my interpretation, though I went to Ghana, though I spoke to Ghanians in America, in Ghana, to mask makers, and fabric stores in Accra (the capital of Ghana), that still, as an outsider of this culture, that I may not have my feelings around this symbol quite right. Sancofa means go back and get it, or that where you from, you may, or maybe, must return to. That you must recall your source, that a river that does not know where it is coming from, will run dry, which were the words my friend, artist Laolo Senbajo said to me when I asked about this symbol. The Sancofa bird can be seen in the background. Sometimes, the symbol looks more like a heart, turning into itself.
Where do we want to return to? What is our source? The ideations behind what we feel is “home” can often be a place across the water, or even, another person. Whatever home is to you, if it is a country, if it is your childhood, if it is the love you once had for yourself, you can return to it. You must remember it. And I think this concept is so pure in its nature, because if you ask and seek the source of anything, we all come back to the same place, don’t we? If you are American, you are human, if you are human, you are living on Earth, if you are living on Earth, you are like any other creature here. If you are a creature here, you are a life form, even a plant. When you recall your source, your essence, I think we all can lead ourselves to one another,
In this image, I changed so much along the way. I imagined a woman, maybe in New York, maybe in Jamaica, looking to what is home over the water. And I thought about how, we never lose anything in life, we just see it from a new vantage point. From my vantage point, I see myself as a human, as living entity, for a short period of time, in a vehicle that is an organic body, and I realize, so are we all. For me, this piece really represents looking back, and finding the collective elements that stitch everything in this world together, from the same origin.
