My Ecue-Yamba-O project celebrates how BIPOC and LTBG+ bodies show resilience, offering strength in the face of adversity. It explores joyful affirmation and self-love, documenting intimacy and indomitability.

This project is the culmination of a lifetime’s interest. Since the beginning of my career as an artist, I have centered my work and research on the historical and present-day connections between Indigenous and African communities in the Americas, and the effects of forced migration, exploitation, genocide, slavery, on-going evolution, inventions, and shifts in culture, visual art and language.

I have used clothing as an instrument with which to connect the past with my present and the future, an energy that is essential to my work. In my clothing, I have made use of the palette and patterns I have found in my research, exploring the interaction of materials and designs, to give them new meaning.

The Ecue-Yamba-O fashion project is an investigation of bodies that celebrate higher entities using peace and joy. I call “higher” the sacred and ancient forces that live in myths, and are figures of light.