View from the performance in front of MAAT, Lisbon, 2024 in connection to the exhibition Black Ancient Futures curated by Camila Maissune.
We’re Magic. We’re Real #3 (These Walls) (2021-present) was presented as a part of Resonance - coinciding with the 61st Venice Biennale In Minor Keys, Resonance was a season of performances, sonic sessions and gatherings organized by The Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (or EADJ for short), founded by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Vanderbilt University.
Presented on May 12, 2026, as part of the collateral project Resonance, this durational performance unfolded along the facade of Fondazione Giorgio e Armanda Marchesani in Venice, with performers Arianella Myers and Shari Petti.
The work was also staged in 2022 at Fisk University’s Cravath Hall, involving students from Fisk and Vanderbilt University and members of Nashville’s Afro-diaspora community as part of The Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, founded by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. It was presented within the program Artistic Activism and the Power of Collective Resistance, curated by Selene Wendt.
Performers are connected to the building by long cornrows that appear to grow directly from the walls. Moving slowly between the building and the canal in a wave-like rhythm, their braids evoke ship ropes and the rigging of slave ships, extending into a sense of diasporic and ancestral connectivity. The performance unfolds along the canal side entrance of Fondazione Giorgio e Armanda Marchesani, a historic palazzetto transformed into a living forum for artistic dialogue throughout the Resonance program. We’re Magic. We’re Real #3 (These Walls) centers hair as an identity marker shared across communities of African descent — a living, embodied archive carried through gesture, presence, and relation.
In Venice, the performance responded directly to the city’s architecture and to the surrounding waters and layered histories that shape the site. Long braids extended into the building connecting Venice’s maritime history to the transatlantic slave economy, today’s Mediterranean migration crisis, and the Black diaspora, evoking themes of connectivity, solidarity, belonging, and ancestral ties.
View from the performance in front of Fonderie Darling, 2023, Montreal in connection to MOMENTA 2023 Masquerades: Drawn to Metamorphosis curated by Ji-Yoon Han.
Photo by Mike Patten
Documentation from the performance in front of Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2022. (snippet)
We're Magic. We're Real #3 (These Walls),long durational performance (2021-ongoing)
The complete series of works uses hair as an important marker of identity within the African diaspora— a simple, yet powerful gesture. Performers with African roots are connected to the facade of colonial buildings through long cornrows, as if the braids were growing directly out of the building’s walls. The hair blends with the facade’s climbing plants, creating a poetic metaphor for the relationship between culture, nature, body and landscape, history and the present. To the sound of the Atlantic Ocean’s roar, the performers move slowly back and forth across the square in front of the building, in a repetitive flow— like the sea— while the long braids form wave-like patterns that simultaneously resemble ship ropes, evoking thoughts of the rigging of slave ships.
Silent, yet insistent, the performers draw attention of passersby through their repeated utterances of an African proverb, spoken in various languages. Equal parts sorrow and strength are present in the meditative performance, which expresses a longing for life beyond the plantation system— and for the forest as both literal and symbolic space(s) for freedom.
The performance was first commissioned by
Mads Nørgaard
2021
