Container Series
Black salt, Black stone
Studio Kiin
About the work
Black Salt, Black Stone draws inspiration from recent critical work centring Black Indigeneity, transoceanic solidarity, and cultural futurism. The project is informed by The Funambulist’s 2024 issue Black Indigeneities: Reflecting on Relationships with the Land in Melanesia, the African Continent, the Caribbean, and the Diaspora, which gathers thinkers and artists reflecting on how land, memory, and sovereignty intersect across Black and Indigenous contexts. This issue challenges colonial separations of Indigenous and Black identities, instead framing land-based relationships as central to future-making and creative survival.
Additionally, Pasifika Black by historian Quito Swan provides a foundational lens for the project’s approach to Afro-Pacific solidarities. The book traces deep-rooted connections between anticolonial resistance in the Pacific and Black internationalist movements, demonstrating how political and cultural solidarities have long existed between African and Pacific peoples. Swan’s work emphasizes the importance of imagination, ancestral knowledge, and spiritual cosmologies in shaping both past and future liberatory visions.
Together, these references support Black Salt, Black Stone as a space for collaborative inquiry, not to define a singular Black futurism, but to invite a plurality of perspectives reflecting ancestral memory, spiritual sovereignty, speculative imagination, and everyday acts of dreaming forward. Rather than centring shared trauma, the project foregrounds creative sovereignty and collective transformation.