The most perfumed bouquet for my mothers

We all have a debt. Historically, women have been weapons of war, at home or in the public arena of the civil conflicts. This bouquet is for you, woman of colour, chained to a war you haven’t chosen, to a colour you sometimes wished you could take off your skin, to religion you cannot hide from your clothes, from the traces of your face, from the words of your language. The heavy hand falls with violence on your face, on your body, it chains you to modesty and to foreign rules of migration to places you never liked but mean survival.

This is the most perfumed bouquet I could find, it carries the weight of our collective debt to you, it is light and perhaps for a few seconds when you breath it in, you might remember old moments of your place, where you came from and now it lives right inside your brain only - because this place no longer exists, it is long gone. So breathe that scent in, stay for a little while, take a rest into the soft perfumed memories of the past and sleep, dream of a better day, when freedom is no longer a remote place, but a permanent presence in every and until the last breath of you.

Diptych, panels of 118x155cm - Acrylics, oil sticks, pastels and pencils of raw cotton canvas

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