Chris/Christina Simons

Scrapnel (2024)
Mixed Media

“I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly…” — Fred Moten

This gallery installation is a circular performance. It performs at being a scrapbook. The scrapbook itself
performs as a gallery installation. The images include recovered photographs and rediscovered domestic
crafts from my family archive alongside documentation from my recent returns to the American Midwest,
where the archive had been damaged.

This work-in-progress gleans from absence and scraps—creating a living archive that attempts to bear
radical with-ness, transformation, and repair to cultural discardability and trash-making. How are
imperialist and capitalist projects performed as class, gender, sexuality, and race in the streets, in
communities, and in the home? What are the processes of resistance and survival? What kinds of cultural
capital might be created from the shrapnel of these toxic projects?