Thank You, Come Again

Watch an introduction to the work and installation walkthrough with the artist, courtesy of SoMad NYC

Thank You, Come Again is a community engaged installation, inviting the public to weave their consumer detritus into a community flag, or bandera. This work seeks to problematize the parallels between plastication, policing, and immigration in a time of climate crisis. This socially collaborative project visibilizes cross-cultural traditions of weaving and craft through accessible, reclaimed material. For this installation, bags were collected and donated by the public, evoking community collection as solidarity; and the loom is built using reclaimed police barricades, representing the violent legacy of policing of immigrant peoples. Thank You, Come Again is named for the quintessential plastic bags that inhabit our lives here in New York City. Plastification is often perceived as unnatural, invasive, foreign, toxic, inevitable, and pollutant — and plastic bags are the epitome of that pollution. This work engages with the tension between how we talk about plastification and how society frames immigration. Government agencies frame immigrants as illegal, unnatural, infestive, foreign, and alien. The dehumanization of immigrants is used to justify over-policing, ICE raids, kidnappings, murder, unjust detention, and incarceration. Additionally, the plastic bag is a relic of immigration. Some of us traveled with plastic bags, carrying and concealing the few remnants of our homelands in them; we took them, reused them, and collected them as daily tools. Our collectively made bandera demands visibility: Visibility of histories of oppressions, imperialism, displacement, police violence, resistance, and ever-presence. Thank You, Come Again demands a rethinking of immigration history through materiality, and asserts futurity: Just like the plastic bag, we will permeate and remain everpresent within the American zeitgeist. May we remain woven together against oppression, may this flag outlive our oppressors.