Freed Your Ankles And Shackled Your Knees

I wanted to start this collection out of a poem I wrote titled “Freed Your Ankles and Shackled Your Knees” in which I talk about the daunting nature of experience as well as its inevitability. In conversation with a friend, I was able to start to understand what that might look like, after they encouraged me to think bigger than the poem and to focus on what informed the way I felt in the poem. The time that informed my poem was across a few months two summers ago, where I wore the same large grey t-shirt and large grey sweat shorts everyday and walked. I had nowhere to go but I felt better walking anywhere than staying at home. I still had a hard time visually grounding the concept until I came across an image titled “Workers Wealth | Village laborer in Diu.” taken by Meena Kadri. The colors, the tattoos, and the jewelry all felt so related to my concept and I knew I had to incorporate it in some way. In my research of Diu, the island in India where the photo was taken, I learned that they were under Portuguese rule for over 400 years, until 1961. Only recently did the people of Diu find sovereignty, but in that time they continued to live and grow even with restrictions. I wanted to celebrate the quiet resilience across cultures but I didn’t want to use the uniform of freedom fighters, instead I thought it would be more powerful to manipulate a colonizing military costume similar to how the Herero Tribe of Namibia does. I chose to take signs of bravery such as medals, epaulets, and fourragere and replace them with cloth that restricts and covers yet can be overpowered. The cloth, meant to be a reflection of experience and hardship, becomes the sign of bravery and the uniform becomes a neutral fact. To tie it back into the poem as well, all the looks are monochromatic with hemlines that stop at the knee, a reference to my aforementioned outfit.