A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience - Catalog - Page 41
william cordova, Memories of Underdevelopment, 2005, enamel, gold leaf, graphite, ink on paper
an innocent child and teenager from culture shock and
disconnection or complete assimilation.
It has been a continuous process of examining, illuminating,
and connecting historical evidence of ritual labor and its theory
to modern examples. It is an attempt to reconsider how the
abstracted evidence of cultural matter plays a large role in the
contemporary world.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” -Socrates
“The examined life is painful. It takes courage to examine who
you are.” -Malcolm X
Examining life prior to the current COVID-19 pandemic,
polarization of government and society, tribalism and
reactionary groups, racism, classism, ageism, sexism; America
has always existed for many groups. America can be like a prism
refracting and creating a spectrum of parallels. Different spaces,
dimensions where some groups spend eternity devoid of any
other presence but their own until the distortion of isolated
realities, or the gated community, becomes transparent and
clarity produces a single light. The unification of the unfiltered
light reveals our parallel communities, neighbors, friends, and
foes. Those unexamined narratives that live next door become
all the more human. New forms of contextualizing Homo sapiens
has its pros and cons, though.
“A slave that dies a natural death will not balance two
dead flies in the scales of eternity,” stated the late activist,
theoretician, and author Eldridge Cleaver. He was addressing
the contemporary state of America in the late 1960s. Cleaver
was talking about complacency, about those parallel spaces that
oscillate and isolate for the sake of conformity. If we are truly to
rid ourselves from the smugness of our own devices, we’d need
to draw from a collective consciousness that truly examines the
unexamined ills of a nation’s past. It takes courage to face these
realities and strength to collectively heal.
“Sky’s the limit” -Dr. Huey Percy Newton
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