In diasporic art practice, a component that regularly appears is the task of investigating the frames we see the world through and proposing alternative frames. In black aesthetic movements such as Negritude and Pan-Africanism, there has been an attempt to return to what once was, a mythological Africa before Western interference, an impossible feat but a frame that has helped direct new visions of black identity with a sense of rootedness. I propose we are always seeing reality through a frame which narrows our perception, which can foster specificity and detail and simultaneously exclude important information we may never be able to recover requiring us to create new patterns that fill in the gaps.
