Not This Time

Not This Time is a visual meditation on how language operates both as a vessel of preservation and as a force that can estrange those born of it but disconnected from its origins. In this series, I don the costume of Wonder Woman—an emblem of heroism and deliverance—layered against a backdrop of the Vai script, a West African writing system historically used in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Here, the script becomes an ancestral code: a visual bridge to a lineage whose stories were disrupted by colonization and cultural erasure. My work draws a parallel between this fragmented sense of belonging and the recent political climate surrounding Kamala Harris’s historic but unsuccessful 2024 presidential campaign. Being amid a language I cannot fully read, Harris navigated an electoral landscape shaped by contradictory and often hostile narratives. The language that surrounded her—campaign slogans, media sound bites, and polarized discourse—both elevated and undermined her, reflecting the United States’ ongoing struggle to confront its own interests, biases, and contradictions. By merging the mythic figure of Wonder Woman with the Vai script, Not This Time interrogates what it means to long for a return to a cultural home while being pressured by forces determined to obscure it. This project suggests that language—whether ancestral or contemporary—holds the power to fracture identities or repair them. Through costume, performance, and the overlay of a script many have inherited but no longer understand, this work becomes a space to mourn what has been lost, to reimagine what might be reclaimed, and to question whose stories are allowed to endure.