an offering to new ancestors(books by Black authors, canned food)

an offering to new ancestors, postcovid', ruins of heteronormativity, and moving images

post-covid' (2021) (shopping cart, Black synthetic hair, recycling, houseplant, found objects in the streets of Foleshill, shopping bag, queer used painting tools, mattress springs, pink hoola hoops, bin bag, digital cam corder)

sorry we are close(d) (2021)
Arcadia Gallery, Coventry
project funded and supported by Coventry Artspace and Coventry Biennial.

Second solo show by melissandre varin- to be experienced from the street - re-imagines a post-covid-19 afro futurity in the city exploring notions of consumption, closed art venues, and collective grief and healing. Levitating at the intersection of pain and love melissandre uses the current context of a never coming ‘post-Covid 19’ and an ever awaited Afro revolution as starting points. They assemble embodied transitions felt in their flesh, navigating Other’s ways to be in the public space, to (r)evolve as Black/queer, and to process exile (forced and voluntarily) in time of global pandemic. Questions of solidarity, afro-futurity, racial capitalism, aesthetics and archiving intersect.


photo credit: Mandip Singh Seehra

funeral of normativity (2021),
documentation of a live street performance on the 14th of February 2021 and melissandre personal archive.
piano improvisation by charl vinz.
text:
'flying on the moon, walking on the moon'
'my kind of time-lapse, my own time-lapse - happening, happening, happening'

This autobiographical work interrogates melissandre’s transness, Blackness and the policed and polished ways of traversing spaces. Walking with an afro queer used shopping cart melissandre ritualistically attempt to foster conversations about the impossibility and possibility to re-contextualise one’s existence.