These Boots Were Made For Walking, a sculptural performance by artist Anina Major, tells a tale of fractured cultural connections across the Black diaspora, by adopting body movement as an expression of agency and a form of problem solving, to comprehend the traces of complex histories inherited. Through performance Major embraces ruin as a signifier of temporal in-between-ness by walking and prancing upon a bed of crushed conch and oyster shells and ceramic mammies shards. Shards composed from slip-casted mass-produced, racially charged ceramic souvenirs and fragments of the artist’s woven works, serve as present-day ostracons. Their physicality creates an unconventional, land-based monument that memorializes the fragility of lost histories and materializes the delicate tension between destruction and perseverance. By stomping the earth, Major rejects colonial systems of value and reclaims the remnants of suppressed narratives.

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