Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, Texas by Jamie Robertson

Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, Texas is an autobiographical examination of my family history through documentary photography and the family archive. The ‘Home Place,’ the land my family has owned for generations, is the site of my creative practice. This landscape filled with its own folklore such as stories of an ax that becomes a lightning rod, Bibles opened to Psalms 91 in every room and people transforming into snakes; inform my photographic eye. The mental images they conjure are the foundations of my work and the beginning of my understanding of the African retentions present within my family.

Time is folded as past and present intersect through my pairing of photographs from my family archive with my own documentation of the Home Place. This intersection of time is greatly influenced by Bântu-Kôngo expressions of the universe through the ideogram Dikenga dia Kongo; a symbol and philosophy of life cycles. Through the use of this living and active cosmology of the ancestors, Charting the Afriscape of Leon County meditates on the Home Place as a Black landscape in rural Texas; centering around the union of my maternal great-grandparents. The enduring memory of my ancestors serves as the beginning of my reconciliation to ancestral concepts of place, time, and the sacred.

Jamie Robertson lives and works in Houston, Texas.
To view more work, please visit www.jamievrobertson.com or follow @hernameis_jamie