photography
Hood Design Studio &
La Biennale di Venezia
Native(s) Lifeways
For Hood Design Studio’s project at the 18th Architecture Biennale, Clelia produced and photogrpahed content for documentation and promotional purposes (social media, client’s website, archive, press office). Images were produced to narrate different aspects of the project, such as the on-site installation phase prior to the Biennale opening to the public and the successive installation photographs of the completed project.
About the project:
Erasure threatens the Black cultural landscapes of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Lowcountry. Wetland development and diminishing rural land tenure endanger these ‘native’ cultural landscapes, which stretch 12,000 square miles from North Carolina to Florida, forging a dialectic between the enslaved Gullah Geechee people, plantations, Carolina Gold rice, sweetgrass baskets, and Africa. Descendent of its adjacent plantation landscape, the 1,000-acre rural agricultural settlement of Phillips is today a modest residential community along the historic Route 1. The landscape beyond its small area of cultivated land is called the ‘overgrown’, rife with native ora such as pine, oak, and palm. Native(s) suggests that Phillips can be born again. It reconsiders the word ‘native’, exploring an alternate vocabulary to critically think about new hybrid formations of Indigenous and foreign landscapes.
