This is an ongoing project in which I document my family within our domestic space in South London as a way of building a living archive shaped by the shifting rhythms of everyday life. While this work starts from a personal desire to remain close to my family, it also extends into broader themes of the ordinary, particularly how ordinary Black life is seen, constructed and represented.

By choosing to focus on my family in this way, I am thinking about the ordinary as a form of resistance. I refuse to render the Black Body as exceptional or faultless, to perform within this narrow expectation placed upon Black subjects. As Kathleen Collins asks, how do we divest ourselves of the need to make ourselves extraordinary? This project attempts to sit with that question.

 This approach is also in dialogue with Zakkiyah Iman Jackson’s concept of plasticity, in which Blackness is made infinitely malleable, allowing for contradictory natures of being, for example, how the Black body can be repositioned as both sub and superhuman at the same time. By focusing on the everyday, I seek to move away from these extremes, creating space in between, for my family to exist without the need to perform or signify beyond themselves.

Ultimately, this project is an attempt to construct an alternative visual language for representing black familial life.