‘The pyramid of Ultra Wet harnesses healing energy from its tip, while its four faces retell urgent stories from pre-colonial Africa’, writes Rezaire. The work’s imagery travels from Credo Mutwa (South African traditional healer)’s village to sandy landscape of Egypt amid computerize emanations to reclaim the legacies of feminine energies. As storytellers chant their litanies for survival towards womxnhood, gender and sexuality in the age of celebrated toxic masculinities, Ultra Wet celebrates the power of the erotic as a creative and transformative force to be nurtured and cherished.
The pyramid echoes the remembrance a time-space where gender was not bound to an arbitrary binary, where the ways of practicing sex did not need to
be an affirmation of identity, where the feminine was praised and nature revered. ‘Viruses then spread into our brains, lands and computers to lead us with fear and shame’, says the artist.
Exploring networked sexualities, this work digs into ancient African knowledge and current cybersexual practices, searching for ways of existing as a Black sexual femme body. How can we reclaim a politic of pleasure and resistance? How can we develop sexual autonomy outside of exploitative and oppressive structures? How can we use our sexual energy to shift consciousness?
As an answer Rezaire writes: ‘We need to bring our minds and our wombs back together to fight, to heal and to create communities where consent, respect and desire coexist.’
Ultra Wet is an ode to the fertile ground we have been and can still be.