About The Collection

Home
theme commentary from Ammu
published 9/7/2025,

Spoilers and content warning for the following: His House, Parable of the Sower, In the Black Fantastic, The Black Shoals, sexual violence, antiblack violence

Home is a collection that was inspired by a variety of texts and media under an Afrofuturist lens that made many different points of commentary and discussion on what home means. From previously discussing spirits in "Blue Undeath", we explored the world-making possible through spirits and how often the afterlives of slavery through indigo meant the logistical extraction may extract our very essance, but also the spirits of the past look on to the violence that has been forever imprinted on this world by those who extract.

Before we start, you will find that there is a very explicit difference between house and home. A house is what is taken from, extracted from, manipulated into, and owned. A home is something that is built, produced, and felt as a site of the past, present, and future, one of which isn't owned by any one being but the collective memory that resides in the home. To put simply, a house is a unit that is measurable, ownable, and reproducable, whereas a home takes unique forms of labor, time, and energy that is reflected in the space its members reside in, even if the space isn't physically demarked.

In the initial brainstorming of this theme, we first began with a concept explored in a phenomenal movie I revisited called "His House." Obvious spoiler warning here (and for the rest of this page). In exploring this movie, Bol and Rial are poised to have the audience conclude that it is a movie about a house haunted by spirits where Bol and Rial get rid of by "accepting the past".  But, within the frame of Afrofuturism, an understanding for the movie becomes sinister in understanding how things like ocean epistemology, conquest, the actions of Bol stealing a child, and assimilation produced a house marked by that the haunting and evil not from the spirit, but from Bol through the choice to deceive and steal a child that ended up drowning on the journey to Britain. Previously, from the angle of spirits, we were able to dissect simultaneous meaning from how we have to live with spirits as spirits and spirituality are important axes of subjectivity for world-building. The house only transformed into a home when they had confronted and examined what their past meant in this society. The reality becomes the image we are shown in the movie, where infrastructure and buildings in the real world and in his house are bleak, uninspired, and mere containers that hold "exceptions" as people that don't conform to the imaginaries of borders, politics, and white supremacy. 

Then, I began to think back to the society created at the end of the Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler referred to as Earthseed. After corporations completely extracted most of California where the book takes place, the catastrophic feel of the environment still gave Lauren and her people hope to continue to form their own communities in the remains of that extraction. While logistical extraction and growth for capital went unabated, houses were created by companies in city towns, the nation referred as the U.S. had began to crumble, and thus homes became scarce. Lauren developed her home through eventually establishing the first Earthseed community, Acorn, that speculatively became a model for what home-as-community could be, even in the midst of disagreement, "external threats", and survival. 

However you believe that Bol is complicit in conforming to white supremacy or whether Earthseed is a good model, we shift the focus from spirits to home because home is unique site that has a multiplicity of meanings that I'll explore below. 

1. The porosity of indigo plantations

Porosity is a concept coined by Tiffany King in her dissertation, The Black Shoals, where she described how black life interacted with indigenous relationality to the human and non-human. Porosity, as it stands, pulled from Saidiya Hartman's concept of critical fabulation, where we ought to use decolonial knowledge systems, archives, and theories to reconstruct what life might have been like beyond the hegemonic liberal world order. In doing so, indigo plantations are a unique speculative mapping that synthesized the horrific violence of black-indigenous death being extracted for capital and labor. It is what Tiffany King describes how the hand of black-indigenous labors combine with the indigo plant, being marked on bodies as chemical processes. Only within black porosity that we can examine the intricate, intertwined moment of indigo as a tool of subjugation, violence, and penetration. 

Thus, we reinvent Indigo through porosity. The staining of indigo extraction displaced a lot of slaves and colonized folks from their homes, homeland, and housed into indigo plantations. 

We use the concept of porosity in this collection and take a hollistic approach to how black-indigenous futures can be mapped on the diasporic terrain globally. The home, invited by a friend of indigo, gave us a space to showcase as our approach to the comprehensive visuals in this collection. Textiles and imagery are often part of the painful but important memory of indigo, in which we feature a lot of textiles, people, objects, plants, and cartography. Additionally, we feature many models of different backgrounds, sizes, looks, etc–but remains significantly insignificant to our overall message and mission especially in finding what home meant. Our home was for all our members to explore, and allowed for multiple stories to be told that centered in different epistemological systems of colonialism, blackness, cartography, whiteness, etc. A lot of conflicting images and staining can be seen in the porosity of the shoot where globes, books, textiles, bodies, nature, objects, and more are reinvented as we embody and shift away from practices, dominance of certain epistemes, and the aesthetics of whiteness present in photoshoots broadly. 

This collection is partially an answer to "what would a world look like without the legacy of indigo?" We hope you've sensed the erotic, the (warm) passionate, and the raw nature of the poses, layout, and aesthetic in this collection. It is indigo that brought us all here.

1a. Porosity and the home of conjure feminism.

As I kept articulating my thoughts about this theme, I came across a phenomenal book called "In the Black Fantastic" by Ekow Eshun, with a chapter of the book written by Kameelah L. Martin called "Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics, Conjure Feminism, and the Arts". My interest followed what Martin discusses as the employment of speculative fiction in the realm of conjure feminism and context of indigo based on the film "Daughters of the Dust". I thought the concept of conjure feminism paired extremely well with porosity.

Conjure feminism is as Martin describes

[...] how and where it is manifesting in contemporary art. Everything Black women create, from quilting, beading and body adornment to hair braiding, dance, song, narrative and visual art, bears evidence of conjure feminism. If conjure feminism is the philosophy through which to name Black women’s ancient intellectual traditions, then conjuring moments and black feminist voodoo aesthetics are the creative application of such. A conjuring moment is an ‘identifiable point in the text where conjuring or African-derived ceremonial practices occur and advance the narrative action’.18 (Eshun 140; Martin 5).

Martin's employment of conjuring feminism was well explained above and something I immediately drew my attention to as black women advanced african traditions and views in numerous speculative forms by magic, spirituality, symbolism, and so much more that created bearings to alter reality. It is often that houses are self-referential, without meaning, that seeks to implicate meaning through magic and spirituality as a commodity. A world with logistical extraction may find it near impossible to have a home without decentering consumption in the house. 

For our theme, usage of indigo, this photoshoot, and our work cumulatively is not meant to parastically devour nor comodify the efforts of black african tradition through conjure feminism, or the application of porosity. Instead, we hope to utilise and build a unique solidarity through different but uniquely aligned struggles and issues that matter to all of us, using these alternative forms of knowledge to reinvent what we understand and sense. Our work stands a starting point to hang the buckets for conversations and exposure to an audience that may not have the time, space, forum, etc–whichever barrier it may be to enrich and challenge their normal, one collection at a time. 

The house has only existed for about 300 years, but the home has been around since the start of civilization. 

2. "Cli-fi" as reality

For LeMenager, her work coins a unique vocabulary that combines both the axes of speculation and the apolcalyptic view of climate change called cli-fi. In using Butler's book, Parable of the Sower, the book features very prominent images that become undiscerningly reality: wildfires ravaging California, political uprising, corporate-nation-state, and the exacerbation of resources. While most of the stories of the apocalypse are made in lens of pessimistic thought, Butler's work and broader usage of cli-fi reimagines the world in developing viable resistence methods accordingly. In the face of complete destruction of the resources, the climate, the ocean, the health, the non-human, all humans, and all that is contained in Earth, we find strength in the communities we unite, even if we all aren't always aligned.

With her concluding words in the section, I'll include it because I enjoyed it a lot:

Perhaps love, in the time of climate change, demands memory and speculation, by which I mean attachment to multiple generations, distant futures as well as distant pasts, all times worthy of curation and song. What could be more difficult than loving across time, across futures and pasts not known? Not attempting to do so might be easier, but lonely-especially in the years of early climate shift, our diminished present. (Lemanger 236)

3. Home as a praxis 

Home is the embodiment of community. Across numerous diasporas and generations of people, we've seen timelessly that care work, disability justice, risk of homelessness, resiliency and survival, and so much more came about in homes. Groups such as the Black Panthers showcased what community looks like in homes through programs that maintained and improved the lives of the members they served, including protection from oppressive forces. 

Many people have chosen their site of community as a home, and it is only in our best interest to dissect and make meaning through indigo. 

Whether the home was a site of celebration, of grief, of trauma, of hardship, the absence of a home, the structural displacement from home, we built out this collection with many different stories from our members as to what home means to them. You can read below an amazing resource list and narrative written by Jerm and April. 

While most people believe community is what you do building up your network of friends and people, it is sadly the furthest away from the truth. Community is not the friends you have that get together out of convenience, but it is the inconvenience of being with people that may not agree with you all the time, but are united by a very similar goal(s) in proximity to you. 

Community is inconvenient. It is hard, tiring, and oftentimes the work within goes unrecognized. However, building out homes means others can find, join, and strengthen their community. In the face of any sort of oppressive force and surveillance, we need to be in community with each other. 

Community does not mean inconvenience yourself if the basic goals or unity aren't agreed upon by its members. You shouldn't have to tolerate folks who intentionally seek to cause harm to you based on your identity, creed, race, ethnicity, etc. Additionally, discrimination and interpersonal relationships in community are poisonous; this is often times why community-as-friend model fails horribly because people create in-groups, out-groups, and individualize community to a person rather than one being. Like companies are recognized as beings in court, we ought to recognize each community as a living, breathing thing, stemming from traditions, history, and practices we've discussed in depth above. 

And if there is no more home, then we must build it ourselves.

4. That's it.

The length of this commentary cannot necessarily be helped. I thought these were important takeaways I wanted inked on the pages of this website. This commentary may have takes that have different opinions, but it is for the viewer to ultimately decide.

I can't be bothered to fix grammar, especially in a time where all text is written by a language model anyways. If I can convey some meaning from this page, then that was the accomplishment of this commentary.

All of our amazing members on this project left behind unique interpretations and extended their understanding of the theme of home with praxis, identity, epistemology, or a mix of the three. 

Quite like the fluid nature of homes, this document will be changed over time as our collective memory and knowledge updates that I will share with you all. 

I hope you enjoy your time being at home, with us as you explore this collection.

Love,

Ammu, Indigo Lead for Logistics and Advocacy

***if you would like a different form of attribution, please contact the collective leadership email on our contact us page.

Sources you should review if you want to explore theme of home more:
With attribution, we have utilized the sources below to write our commentary

1. His House Our Home composed by Dr. Maisha Wester

   • Hegira

   • That's not my house by Otis Mensah

2. His House

3. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler 

4. The Black Shoals by Tiffany King

   • A portion of Footnote 97 that brilliantly details critical fabulation:
     97 Hartman develops the notion and practice of critical fabulation as practiced by Black scholars who must engage the brutal archives of slavery and their gaps. What she describes as the “double gesture” involved in “critical fabulation” explains holding in tension the practice of both straining against the limits of the archive through creating narrative[-]figurative[-]speculative work and acknowledging the impossibility or the failure of being able to fully represent the lives of the captives in the archive. In the essay “Venus in Two Acts” and in the book Lose Your Mother, Hartman confronts her own process of grappling with hope and the impossibility of being able to know what happened. She must come to terms with the fact that she can never know, “for instance[,] that the two wordless girls on the Recovery found a country in each other’s arms”; further, she does not want to “place yet another demand” on the girls or the dead: 

     • Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman

     • Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman

5. Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre by Stephanie LeMenager

6. In the Black Fantastic by Ekow Eshun

7. History of Home by April Linton

8. Housing Resource List by Jerm Ayaku

9. AFR 330T "Diaspora Magic" by Hershini Young

10. The "Indian" Of Four Continents: by Shaista Patel