Fashioning freedom

This article examines the work of contemporary Haitian visual artist Tessa Mars through the lens of Afrotopian thought and Afro-diasporic theories of worldmaking. It develops the concept of ‘fashioning freedom’ to describe the artist’s engagement with the revolutionary archive through costume, performance, and the body. Focusing on Dress Rehearsal (2018) and Goddess of Memory (2018), the article shows how Mars approaches figures such as Capois-la-Mort and Jean-Jacques Dessalines as roles and gestures to be inhabited and transformed rather than fixed historical icons. The first work stages a playful space of rehearsal and multiplicity, the second turns toward care, centring figures like Défilée and Catherine Flon and the labour of tending to the dead and the past. Both works articulate a practice in which memory is carried through embodied gestures and where freedom is continuously fashioned through care and creative transformation.

This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence through the support of the Winthrop-King Institute: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .