One day, the Etruscans encountered a family of Black people who appeared displaced, residing in a small village in Rome. They displayed no signs of terrestrial origin. The family remained with the Etruscans for a day, engaging in collaborative work, sharing meals, conversing, and attempting to understand each other’s languages. The following morning, they had vanished without leaving any trace, except for collage-like artworks that seemed to be maps. Two children, a sister and a brother, recall observing the family dissipate into a landscape of trees and grass beneath a dark, starry night sky, implying they were spirits, full-body apparitions, or perhaps lost extraterrestrials.

While residing in Rome as an art fellow at the American Academy, I became interested in the Etruscan civilization, concentrating on their visual language, spiritual beliefs, and urban architecture. My studio and accommodation were situated at the American Academy’s Casa Rustica, where astronomer Galileo Galilei exhibited his innovative invention, the telescope, to an attentive audience. During my visit, I encountered these collage-like artworks that suggest potential journeys, cosmologies, and the desire of the lost Black family to find its way home. The pieces appear to encode the tradition of collage alongside a reinterpretation of Black cultural storytelling.

The concept of an afterlife exists in a space just as memory traverses physical realms. How can memory be preserved and maintained while also imagining oneself as the memory by creating a new one? What does it mean to translate a mapping experience that has both existed and never existed? These artworks are the material translations that the siblings discovered after the disappearance of Black beings. They examine ideas of transformation and the extensive use of material as a means of transcendence and as a repository for memory and potential futures.