Rhizomes To the Soul

Midway through 2024 -  I had just completed second year units at university, navigating my identity as a black queer woman within the institution of UAL. Using ‘A Thousand Plateaus’  by Deleuze and Guattari as my bible in critiquing and conceptualising one's sporadic, experimental and often jaded self-perception in the space that constantly demanded coherence -  obedience. 

In the opening of their work, they write ‘A book is neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds to attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters and exteriority of their relations’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2, 1980), This line reshaped how I understood my practice,  idiosyncratic and rhizomatic in nature; one that cannot be explained using traditional psychoanalytic concepts founded by Freud and Lacan. One that could perfectly illustrate the shadow of feeling insane, marginalised and unseen on the course. 

 ‘The ego. My ego. How to situate an ego. An ego felt in waves and accumulated black dots. “I sound fucking crazy. 'Black hole, White Wall.’" - (Da’Costa 2024a - 2025)  

 “By refusing to multiply the elements of his personality, by striving for a harmonious integration, the black man is inevitably set on a path of mental exhaustion. It is important, however, to tell the black man that an attitude of open rupture has never saved anyone. And although it is true that I must free myself from my strangler because I cannot breathe, nevertheless it is unhealthy to graft a psychological element onto a physiological base.”  -  Frantz Fanon, Black skin, White Mask (1952)

I had always found myself drawn to unpacking the experiences that had shaped not only my life but my very thought process. Foucault once said : ‘Each time I have attempted to do theoretical work it has been on the basis of elements around my experience (Foucault, 1981, cited in Rajchman, 1988, p. 108)’ (Salehi, 2008), anchoring and justifying the urge to use theory as a body based practice. The image ‘White Hole, Black Wall’ (p.25) visually embodies that tension. Visually, it presents as a black field interrupted by a blurred white mark. Conceptually, it flips D+G’s’ notions of the “black hole, white wall”, as they denote it as,  “the face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of… it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 168). The emphasis of portrait photography forces identity becomes a trap: seen and scrutinised into coherence, while simultaneously dissolved into a void. The image speaks to that violence — of how the face served paints the illusion of a known entity and sense of familiarity -  although only presents is a fractured state expelled by the institutional gaze - my own image and body rendered both as evidence and absence. Here : the blackness is a grounding space, the backdrop of being while the intrusive white mark becomes the imposed spotlight - a metaphor for how blackness is hypervisible because it is a minority. The image speaks to the violence of being illuminated only to be contained, expected to perform identity through institutional stereotypes of race, resistance or trauma. It was never about being seen because I am Black person. I needed to be seen for me ; screaming ‘I’m fucking here.’ The final work unfolded as a disjointed sequence of black and white test strips, gelatin prints, distorted overlays, and hand-drawn annotations, with critical jargon included.  

A wave of applause erupted at the table yet I sat with tears pricking my eyes when I received my results. Strong A. 

‘I had been exploited somehow. I danced the performance they wanted me to, and yet I am still made to be the fool, they are the fucking  c-’ (Da’Costa, 2024a-2025, June 16th 2024). I couldn’t have been any clearer, explicitly dissecting the overexposure and marginalisation of my race and sex. I had purposely used my traditional practices in the darkroom to visually convey how it felt to be seen in parts, rather than as a whole; different grades of exposure to penetrate the idea that I had been made into a stagnant entity, similarly to the Ash Dome created by David Nash that ‘hues are ever changing. In the long Welsh winters it appears almost monochrome - a thatch spidery black lines against slate - grey sky - but in may it erupts into colour’ (Fox 220)  The 22 ash trees, planted by Nash, are often documented as ‘tough but pliable and usually receptive to human manipulation’ (Fox 219). In the recent years of Ash Dome, which has been under attack by Ash Dieback (hymenoscyphus fraxineus) which causes white fungus spores that if left untreated will cause the tree to lose its foliage and eventually die.  Nash in a 2018 interview said ‘I have been documenting Ash Dome - following it. I’ve been watching it living and growing…but now I’m watching it dying. (Fox 221) At that moment, I had felt like the Ash Dome, whose physicality was being destroyed by the infestation of my white peers' interjection into my culture, identity and emotions. I had been fighting a battle I couldn’t win.  Through tears I murmured ‘ I dug through concrete and bloomed flowers; yet they still mistook the roses’ red. (Lattina Da’Costa, 2024a-2025, Personal Diary). 

A part of me knew that even through my extensive use of visual language dismantling my instability and frustration of being ½ black women on my course that the work was to fall on silent ears.  The educational system throughout history has consistently championed ‘ a specific class (high), a specific race (white), a specific gender (male), and occurs within a specifically Western paradigm.’ (Salehi 24). Franz Fanon echoed around me, ‘The negro who has gone through the school system is different from the negro who has not.’ (Fanon 18). The subject of my work had blurred the lines of what were subjective and critical thoughts of a black woman with scholarly study and traditional processes - I had become a praxis that had contributed to my isolation within UAL, ‘bereft of the creativity and vitality that can renew and redefine social relationships’ (Gibson 10). Like my brother I had felt stripped from space and time, almost as if I had never existed. In that moment of supposed achievement, I felt an overwhelming sense of detachment—had I really succeeded, or had I simply learned to contort myself into a shape the institution could tolerate? 

‘Did I really say I just say I was being tolerated?’ (Lattina Da’Costa 2024a-2025, 25th March 2025)

The accolades of getting an A and high praises chained me to continue exploring my  personal ghost stories, as summer rolled around, I had spent the days inside assorting primary documentation in response to Alexander's’ missing investigation. Perhaps with this work, I could hope to show everyone why image making was significant and how one person's absence had shaped it and to truly understand the phantoms that formed shadows in my work.