Tree of Peoples — Museum Installation, Paris

5 October 2017 · Paris

A large black panel dominates the frame, its surface covered in a red-painted tree whose branches spread into dozens of handwritten people names in French — Basques, Tibétains, Afghans, Somalis, Coréens, and scores more. The work maps human diversity as a single rooted organism, each branch carrying a different people to the same canopy. It catalogues the world's peoples as kin: branching apart in name and place, converging at the trunk. Photographed in a Paris museum, the installation sits beside a cluttered assemblage of found objects, grounding the abstract taxonomy in something tactile and material.