Magic Mountains Magic Cities 2023

My mother and I grew up in the same house, my grandmother's house, in Fairfield, Alabama adjacent to Birmingham. I never knew my grandmother, she passed before I was born, but these conversations with my mother, my aunties, my uncle give me some access to her, to a cross-generational Black landscapes through our home. A lot of people are from steel towns but ours was a model, very literally a model planned by and for U.S. Steel corporation. The kinds of extraction that brought Birmingham, the Magic City into being, is also a part of the genesis of our town. But the landscape, the reshaping of small bits of earth by those who inhabit it, the memories of being in in that place, belong to us, they are a part of a Black landscape that my grandparents and elders built and shaped together.

Magic City, abra cadabra, a slight of hand. The close proximity of Birmingham is important to the story. Birmingham is called the 'magic city' because of the geological fortune (misfortune) that surround it. Rocks, minerals, iron ore, limestone and coal were the understory of Birmingham, and of our town. Their extraction was and is a part of the emergence of a Black landscape, our Black landscape.

In this project as in others, I have tried to engage the problem of photography, thinking about the camera, the lens, and this idea about the visual frequency of Black life that Tina Campt writes about. I am curious about a kind of frequency of Black life that might exist in geology. Black study has allowed us to unsettle how we understand the human and how we understand life and matter. We can call it new materialism we can call it post humanism and all of that’s true but in this work, I am interested to know how Black study and Black feminism specifically have to teach us about the mine. A rock, is it a living thing, can it, does it resist?