Lizette Nin is a visual artist and researcher whose practice is intersectional, engaging with the deconstruction and reconstruction of Afrocentric histories by creating languages that navigate and thereby negotiate origins, identities, and corporeal existences. Her artistic practice involves the palimpsest: rewriting and retelling the untold and forgotten histories of racialized bodies in a historical continuum. By delicately composing a hybrid image that organically binds braided hair with growing plants, Nin revisits in Trails her series of drawings, Bajar con trenzas, which renders the locus of Black hair as a weapon of resistance and anti-colonial consciousness. In these drawings, the new image that emerges from the seeds hidden in the braids becomes the carrier of escape routes, a way out of enslavement, a way into the world. In the tradition of marronage as the formation of a community of fugitive enslaved people, Trails playfully depicts the tension between roots and routes, between being rooted and having to escape.

Works in the exhibition: Trails (2021/23), prints, paint on fabric, 120 × 260 cm. Courtesy of the artist