Every year, millions of Pacific salmon migrate back through their ancestral waterways to spawn and die in their natal streams. Retracing the earth’s magnetic and chemical pathways over hundreds of miles, salmon return home to birth new life and pass onto the next. Oceanic phosphorus and nitrogen in their bodies then fertilize the riverbeds, feeding generations of forests and fauna across the Pacific Northwest. In this sacred ritual, death becomes life.

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Every year, millions of Pacific salmon migrate back through their ancestral waterways to spawn and die in their natal streams. Retracing the earth’s magnetic and chemical pathways over hundreds of miles, salmon return home to birth new life and pass onto the next. Oceanic phosphorus and nitrogen in their bodies then fertilize the riverbeds, feeding generations of forests and fauna across the Pacific Northwest. In this sacred ritual, death becomes life.

In June 2020, I came home to Seattle amidst a moment of communal rupture and mourning, and revisited a childhood tradition of watching salmon return from the sea. I’ve since been documenting their annual migration through photographs, maps, sketches, and other visual ephemera to honor the life that blooms from their ritual death. The species’ kinship to the Coast Salish way of life pre-dates colonialism by many millennia, and it continues to sustain the ecological, cultural, and spiritual reciprocity of the region today despite extraction and habitat loss under the settler state. In tracing the salmon run through the places I grew up, I’ve begun to draw continuities from coastal climate justice and indigenous wisdoms to my own articulations of diaspora, loss, grief, and survival.

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A pair of slow clocks: one that stops when looked at, another submerged in gooey oil. Each loses momentum the more it labors. Dormant at first, a pulse can only be discerned if you give it time and listen closely.

Exhibited at the School for Poetic Computation. Featured in Creative Applications.

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A pair of slow clocks: one that stops when looked at, another submerged in gooey oil. Each loses momentum the more it labors. Dormant at first, a pulse can only be discerned if you give it time and listen closely.

Drawing from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ elegy to queer love in Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1997–90), I’ve been thinking of “broken” timepieces as an expression of grief—one where time is an account of life, and all loss is political. How do we even begin to contend with the matrices of loss under capitalism? How do we measure the time they’ve extracted from us and our ecologies?

But I also wonder if there’s beauty to slowness. Consider this an anti-technology: a device designed to be unproductive, inconsumable. A shy clock that intimates its passage only to those patient enough. It breathes new meaning into “keeping time”—keeping life, holding life, preserving life. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “where life is precious, life is precious.”

Exhibited at the School for Poetic Computation. Featured in Creative Applications.

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A pocket poster and pamphlet to help keep each other safe in the fight to keep us all safe. Co-organized and designed with Zainab Aliyu and By Us For Us, with contributions from a community of organizers, artists, and educators. Distributed by small press for free across New York and the Bay Area.

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A pocket poster and pamphlet to help keep each other safe in the fight to keep us all safe. This was an emergency collaboration with contributions from a community of organizers, artists, and educators responding to our friends’ arrests in the Bronx following the state murder of George Floyd.

Co-organized and designed with Zainab Aliyu and By Us For Us. Distributed by small press for free across New York and the Bay Area. Available as an 11”x17” foldable poster for your pocket, and 8.5”x11” pamphlet to share as a PDF or print at home.

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