Written Works by Ellis Antonio, Lunetta Green, and Camille Steele
In honor of Black History Month, we decided to pass the baton to a few of our lovely friends and WOMO muses. With no specific prompt, we asked them to write and share with us whatever felt most relevant and true to them at this moment in time. Below are those three separate pieces. The first by Ellis Antonio, the second by Lunetta Green, and the third by Camille Steele.
“Pumps” by Ellis Antonio
My brothers and sisters are hurting.
The clouds that have remained have now become a heavy fog
Fog into rain
Rain into hail
Remember what got us here.
Resilience and resistance exemplify our existence
One foot in front of the other
Hand in hand with each other
Heel toe heel toe
We walk
Some of us faster than others, depending on the weather
Although the sky may be grim due to the world's current state
We continue to walk
We continue to breathe
We continue to be
As winter turns to spring
And spring turns to summer
We feel the warmth from the sun
As we relight each other
The fire that kept us warm
Through the nights of frigid air
Is the same heat that will power us through this despair
As we walk
We will continue to create
We will continue to inspire
As well as feed each others desire
Remember we built this world no matter the weather,
And we will continue to walk through this together.
I love all of you,
Ellis
“Tiny Table With No Chairs” by Lunetta Green
Insufferably comical, to you, I can exist as a vanishing emblem of sensation
Yet you are, one among a few, desernments for what I once was to who I am now
Blonde imprinted on your largest organ. Dirty strands of grass into the defrosting spring.
Matching luggage to store away insurmountable guilt
Framed with portraits and letters of those you wish to become.
A palm smoothed by an effortless yearn. mouthing forever questionable lies. A cast healing only
cartilage and skin.
I hope I run into you one day in LA. Fetishizing the festering guilt veil itself in your cracking
inexpressible features.
Camille Steele
I study Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design and every year, third year students do a project sponsored by Tory Burch. The project is also a competition, the finalists are selected to be summer interns for the company. For my project, I collaborated with Jordan Perdomo, a friend in another class, to further materialize my concepts surrounding the Tory Burch Foundation and its relationship with women’s empowerment. After Jordan presented our project to his class, he was rejected by the professor. So, for my presentation, I adjusted the tone, watering down my accusations into suggestions. But altogether, we were forced to work within the confines of reverence for the company, diluting the rebellious spirit of our project. For those who are curious, below is my original writing.
The Tory Burch Foundation works towards women's empowerment by supporting the financial success and expansion of women entrepreneurs. When looking at the structure of the company, attention is drawn to the Members of the Board. Predominantly white, overwhelmingly wealthy, these multi-millionaires all hold managerial positions in notoriously exploitative, multi-billion dollar, and globally significant, corporations. Their participation in the Foundation is an exercise of their position in capitalist hegemony. They now trickle-down their capitalist ideologies to small-scale entrepreneur networks, and adopt a philanthropic character at once.
The garment we received from Tory Burch is a dress with a bodice of black velvet and a cream cotton-linen blend skirt. Dozens of beautifully intricate pintucks riddle the waistline. Curiously enough, the origin of the pin tuck dates back to the beginnings of the 20th century, with the practice of Heirloom sewing techniques. This era was host to the American Women’s Suffrage Movement.
The Women's Suffrage movement advocated for women’s political participation and economic freedom through entering the workforce. This era saw an astronomical increase in women’s employment from 2.6 to 7.8 million. Often overlooked are the white-supremacist ideologies held by some of the most prominent figures of the movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a matriarch of the Suffragettes, actively protested against the right to vote for Black men, as she believed in the assertion of power for white women as a priority before Black rights. Behind the movement was a strategy to enfranchise white women so their vote may count towards policy upholding systemic racism.
Also overlooked, is the organized undercurrent of the Suffragette movement, a network of Black women. They wrestled for the cause and yet did not reap the benefits of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. We see a dire parallel between a vertical hierarchy of women of color and working-class women acting on the frontline and as an undercurrent of movements for women's empowerment while those at the top, figureheads and funders, are overtly racist and capitalist. This system appears in both the Women's Suffrage movement and the structure of the Tory Burch Foundation.
Now that we’ve exposed the harsh reality of both efforts being founded upon white-supremacist-capitalist hegemony, we imagine a subversion of the system. How can we visualize and activate women's empowerment outside of the narrow scope of economic accumulation?
Remaining in the vein of agriculture, we glean from Indigenous knowledge the practice of companion planting. Companion planting is a farming technique where certain crops are grown alongside others, creating mutual support. Their compatibility allows them to stimulate, feed, and support each other as they grow in unison. The three sisters, corn, beans, and squash are the companion plants of sunflowers.
Once united, the sunflower stalk now becomes a support system, an element of a circular system of collaborative sustenance. Moving backwards, we introduce the philosophy/action of controlled burns as the genesis of reconstructing systems of women's empowerment.
Controlled burns are an Indigenous land care practice where land is burned to set a place for new growth. We must embrace the regenerative power of destruction whilst we prepare for communal reconstruction.
On reconfiguring the Foundation:
Preparing for communal reconstruction looks like a reconfiguration of the current educational methods practiced by the Foundation.
We propose an introduction of on-the-ground resources that transcend the digital education platform. What would it look like for the Foundation to materialize as a series of physical group think tanks, established in a diverse network of locations? Or physical chapters of outreach programs that provide support and networking that extends beyond a yearly summit?
While the online platform features a wealth of videos and business templates, the Foundation's educational methods lack an immersive experience for their broad community of learners. So many businesses created by the Fellows of the Foundation are rooted in stimulating the health and well-being of their communities. The Foundation should model their practices after the women they support by offering a platform for the Fellows to share their wisdom to broader audiences and extend the reach of their work. Education for women’s empowerment signifies not only economic savvy but a broadening of skills that develop women’s capacity for communal interdependence.
On the Machine and agents of performance:
There are four actors of the performance which model agents of the existing capitalist system. The Wearer, the Operator, the Garment, and the Machine.
The Machine is a continued iteration of the aforementioned concept of systems of vertical success. Modeled after the mechanics of an original hand-crank cotton gin, the machine signifies the physical objects and institutions that have accelerated the commodification of land and human labor, in observance of the capitalist growth imperative. The Machine consists of two parts, a crank made from found metal objects, notions from Tory Burch’s donations such as leather straps and hanger wire, and Japanese knotweed, which is an invasive species of New York. These objects, held together, bring into conversation the industrial surfaces we come in contact with as well as the natural life that has mutated in response to the imposition of industrialism. The second part is a black form textured with rows of cotton cloth, resonant with the architecture of a factory, a house, a church. The structure brings attention to the cult of domesticity that has risen from industrialism and how capitalist economic development, made possible by the labor of the Operator of the crank and Wearer of the garment, has accelerated in conjunction with the social stratification of women.
The Wearer and Operator stand for human involvement in the fashion industry.
The Wearer exists for those who have been tirelessly eroded by lack of access to resources and time to be self-sufficient, and coerced by the industrial market into being a dependent consumer. While the Operator stands for the human who has also been revoked of their self-sufficiency and forced into labor for fashion production. Both performers are Black and femme, a demonstration that both laborer and consumer presently share a body of the oppressed.
The Garment signifies the fashion product. Uninterrupted, the garment exists yet as another iteration of fashion capitalist venture. Once retailed at $1,699 then marked down to $999, the depreciation in value nods to the futility in overproduction for the sake of market relevance and competition. In performance, we acknowledge the potential for the garment to morph into a product of positive collective work and responsibility when activated by the motion of the undercurrent.
In performance:
The cords hanging from the garment signify our intervention. They’re informed by the Black women of the Suffrage movement, the Tory Burch Fellows, the vines of companion plants. They run as an undercurrent tethered to the hem of the dress, between the lining, and through the gaps between pintucks. In performance, the Operator fastens these cords to eyelets that are welded onto the machine’s spinning rod. Once in motion, the cords begin to wind and pull at the garment, shaping it into a floral form reminiscent of the female anatomy. In honor of the generations of women who will be the harbingers of liberation from exploitative hegemony.
With gratitude, Camille
We hope you have a beautiful rest of February, and Happy Black History Month. Talk soon x
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