On the Lawh: What the Water Carries

Thierno Deme received a grant for the development of new work. On the Lawh: What the Water Carries is a development project deepening his previously made installation work In Communion with the Other: A Textual Baptism. The work draws from a protection ritual within my own family's practice and queers it. Making use queer, theoretical, and media texts for sacred inscription and redirecting its protective force toward afro-diasporic queer youth.

Thierno Deme is an artist, curator, and writer working at the intersection of Black study, ritual, and the poetics of unworlding. His practice moves between writing, installation, and experimental programming to ask how endings, of oppressive worlds, inherited categories, and settled ways of being, can become generative. Grounded in a refusal of fixed disciplines and singular narratives, he approaches art as a space to rehearse alternative ways of being together: errant, polyphonic, and attentive to what escapes legibility.