2024, 120mm film. Photography by Helena Exquis.
When speaking of the aesthetics of Latin American and Black girls living in the US, Jillian Hernandez wrote that ‘Aesthetics of excess embrace abundance where the political order would impose austerity’. For me, aesthetics of excess are a site where the (Latin American) subject has the agency to imagine their own abundance outside from state-controlled resources, and where this abundance meets the politics of pleasure and history as something primarily material.
I am particularly interested in the physicality of the gold hoop - the gold, the glow, the circular, loop shape. Can the gold hoop be a measurement of time, a signifier of a history that is not linear, but cyclical - a history of colonialism and extractivism that never ended for the Global South, just reinvented itself into different politics? Can the gold hoop be an act of rebellion?