Invisible Ink: Reparations

In Invisible Ink, I invited spectators to engage with me in an interrogation of whiteness that moved beyond the white-walled gallery space into real world action…that in fact helped to reimagine the real world as the art world and action as art.

Working in collaboration with conceptual artist Natasha Marin, I orchestrated and participated in the transmutation of digital artifacts from Marin’s recent work Reparations into the most basic of material elements in order to create a hyper-deliberate, sensual, embodied experience of privilege and accountability in visitors to the installation.

Transcribing in lemon juice—homemade invisible ink—a digital backlog of requests for help, offers of support, and assaultive troll attacks received by Marin during her six-month Reparations project, participants and I produced a 1000-foot-long enunciation of the ways whiteness protects those affiliated with its power from awareness of and accountability for the costs and benefits of that artificial construction. As participants ironed out the lemon juice messages, we enacted the process of making need and harm visible and were then invited to go farther—to take simple actions to meet need and remedy harm by responding materially to the original messages.