Feral: assiyah jamilla

House House Press

Is ferality what remains when we are stripped of everything but need? Yielding to negotiations of trauma and longing, feral explores how it is in our most desperate moments that we are most like animals. In the wake of the many wars waged against the body, the infinite violence of necessity and desire is put upon us, eaten again and again, until we become our basic needs. assiyah jamilla plays out the trap of our dying world, of the love we feel and fear, of german engineering, as the place where our eyes turn inward and we cease to recognize ourselves. In this post-apocalypse, we are only left with relation and the potential for survival.

assiyah jamilla is a multidisciplinary artist of west african descent. She was born and raised on Skwxwú7mesh land and is currently based in Kanien’kehà:ka territory. Unattached to any specificity in form, medium, or matter, her work is never singular. With her emphasis on kinaesthetic memory and longing, inter-generational trauma as inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site, she engages their duplicities through ritual, compulsion, and sound.

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