“I investigate and explore melancholia in diaspora using decolonial methods and a return to ancestral knowledge and practices. Through objects and memories that are both intimate and estranged, I wish to consider the effects of assimilation and fragmentation that migrant experiences hold. Using interdisciplinary artistic practices that center performative film, oil paintings, installations, embroidery, digital collage, poetry and short stories, my work is a play on expectations and translations of racialized and migrant bodies. I aim to empower racialized bodies through ritual while celebrating symbols of beauty like the brown skin and the black braid that have been undermined by colonialism, wielding ancestral knowledges as a way of offering, of healing, and of sharing. I wish to celebrate the differences in media and interdisciplinarity to “disrupt” the white cube rhetoric through decoration while evoking a sense of feeling “at home” to honor the mother, the motherland, the mother tongue and rituals lost to the onslaught of overwhelming eurocentrism and patriarchal colonialism. This work that I do is for other brown bodies like mine who may have felt lost in their journeys of crossing borders. Weaving and sharing stories that acknowledge our wholeness and our traumas may lead us in a direction where we might someday feel less sick and more whole in our sometimes exhaustive, stories of home-loss.”