Memories of Creative Awakening : Q’oy Dill

I’m a Black, queer, non-binary, multi-disciplinary creative from San Francisco, Ca (Hunter's Point) with deep southern and mid west roots. My central practice is in fashion activism and rebellion. I am fascinated and troubled by the history of race in America and base my enquiry in the philosophy of fashion. My work is rooted in the examination of clothing as a tool to transcend or evoke a radicalized experience. In this I build on a meta narrative; a messy detangling of sartorial discourses of race. Through the use of a concept coined by Algerian novelist, Assia Djebar, my work takes The Fourth Language and uses it as a tool of divestment from obsessive racial politics.

The Fourth Language is the language of the body that cannot be colonized by patriarchal language. It exists in the fourth dimensional space of the imaginary and is accessible only via the creative un-censoring of the body, resisting categorization and binary divisions. The body becomes a vessel for communication that cannot be easily controlled or confined by external forces. Fashion becomes a visual language, understood by those who are attuned to its nuances and symbolism. My practice subverts fixed identity and racial formulations by expanding on the many meanings of the form through fashion. My work problematizes normative archives of Blackness and the ways in which clothing can play a role in the transcendence of race; elevating radical deviant ideologies of fashion as activism.