2026
The Cycle of History is a Cage
Two Channel Video
It’s the squeaking wheels of the antique tank that still play on a loop in my head.
The interview in this installation video was shot in Washington DC, by sheer coincidence, the day after Trump threw himself a military birthday parade. A feeble minded retch in his last days, possessed by delusions of grandeur, aspiring to North Korean levels of pageantry but managing only the shuffling of boots by uninterested soldiers and squeaking antique tanks. The following day, en-route to The National Museum of African American History and Culture where this interview took place, we walked past the tanks, the grandstand, the cleanup.
The real cleanup, however, has yet to begin. To undo the damage that has been done since January of 2025 will probably take the rest of my lifetime, if not longer. But what this interview reminds us is that what we are currently experiencing in the US echoes to us from the past. America has played footsies with fascism before, was born from an inhumane compromise and if a plurality of our citizenry cannot bring themselves to recognize from whence we came, the expiration of our Dear Orange Leader is not going to rescue us from this recent resurgence.
For two days we visited locations in the Washington DC area central to African American history. Anacostia, the house of Frederick Douglas, the Smithsonian and we talked about the connection between our ugly history and our increasingly ugly present. This 10 minutes is a short section of a much longer conversation that was had. A conversation American needs to keep having long past when the cameras turn off. The only way to break this repeating cycle of history is to shine a light on it and see clearly the story of where we've been and know that this is where it is once again going to take us if we continue to shrink away from focusing light into dark corners.
Welcome to the 21st century version of wealthy land owners, slave patrols and marinating white grievance. To paraphrase an old chestnut: those who cannot remember and reconcile with the past are doomed to repeat it.