Simon(e) van Saarloos:

Oh my goddess, this work, this artist! Tabita Rezaire works with mythology, suppressed histories, energy, and new media. The hyper-virtual world comes along with a physical practice: feeling your body, breathing. Everything flows together in the body: history, water, trauma, enjoyment, and pleasure. This fluidity presents an exercise: physical work enables healing, for example of intergenerational trauma, and helps to imagine the future (imagining justice from a position of calmness and desire). In her film Deep Down Tidal, Rezaire approaches the ocean like a cemetery of Black history and technology. She shows that the fiber cables which facilitate data transfer, follow the same route as the colonial ships which transported enslaved people across the Atlantic Ocean. In this way, Rezaire criticizes the way the so-called free flow of information on the internet builds on the familiar mechanism of exclusion: racism and exploitation. Rezaire calls this electronic colonialism. By this she means the abundant circulation of Euro-centric knowledge and the forced dependence of formerly colonized countries, maintained by software, hardware and information protocols imposed by Western engineers. Deeply critical of normalized violence, Rezaire’s work centers on healing. She is a doula and kundalini yoga instructor. Sugar Walls Teardom invites you for serious participation in a guided meditation.