Initiation

Horace Williams House |  610 E Rosemary St, Chapel Hill, NC 27514

Ended February 25th, 2024

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“There is a thing passing in the sky; some thick clouds surround it; the uninitiated sees nothing”

 

—Mende Proverb, cited in bell hooks' Art on My Mind.

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Initiation is an immersive installation by Paula Damasceno that transforms the octagonal room of the Horace Williams House into a meditative space for engaging with the Offerings series. This collection of twelve diptychs bridges historical photographic methods, ancestry, colonial violence, resilience, and modernity through the lens of Transamerican African Diaspora practices and visualities.

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Each diptych comprises a case crafted from Iroko wood—both a tree and a deity channeling ancestral divinity. On the right side, tintypes suggest offerings dedicated to specific Orishas, while the left side features press-printed fabrics adorned with abstract shapes and colors that reference the Orishas’ spiritual and aesthetic lexicon. Encased in black velvet, the diptychs reflect a critical investigation of archival display, preservation, and poetics.

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The Offerings tintypes disrupt traditional archival and ethnographic conventions. Refusing detailed representation, they emphasize absence, abstraction, and refusal. Their interplay with vibrant, geometric fabrics reclaims African diasporic aesthetics from modernist appropriation, embodying what Robert Farris Thompson describes as the "Aesthetics of the Cool"—a dynamic balance between restraint and vitality.

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Accompanying the Offerings are three archival pigment prints (Surrender), an unbound Risograph artist book translating Initiation, and found objects of material culture. Together, these elements create a multi-temporal atmosphere that invites reflection on the intangible dimensions of diasporic histories and cultures, past and present.

 

This project was supported by the N.C. Arts Council, a Division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, The Arts Council of Winston-Salem, and Forsyth County, and ArtsGreensboro.