Ancestral (sh*t) Residue emerges from an ongoing inner monologue with my ancestors: both intimate and distant. It is about inheritance that cannot be spiritualized or forgiven away. It comes from living with the knowledge (from a young age) that my ancestors and close relatives were morally and ethically wrong. Wrong about sexuality. Wrong in how they used power. Wrong in their violence toward children, women, queer bodies. Wrong in how pedophilia, sexual abuse, forced silence, abortions, miscarriages, and so-called “love babies” were handled, hidden, or normalized.
This work is about digesting that.
The composition begins with a brown nipple: not erotic, but initial. A source. From it, chocolate milk spills. The milk is excessive, sticky, indulgent. It represents nourishment that is not clean: care that carries harm. It feeds a frog/monstera hybrid: a body that adapts, survives, mutates.
The milk sinks into fascia- and mycelium-like structures, suggesting how damage spreads underground, quietly, through networks that are supposed to support life. It enters thick veins, arteries, and intestines: organs that labor, transport, and carry weight.
At the center sits a blue triangular pancreas as a sacred gate. A filter. A place where what is taken in must be broken down to survive. What passes through it reforms into a large ambivalent figure: part satyr, part fetus, part sh*t. Its color recalls red clay, terracotta, ancestral figurines, but also waste. Something shaped by history and expelled by necessity.
The figure holds contradiction. It references perpetrators and victims at once. Sexual violence, abortion, miscarriage, malformed and interrupted lives. The red glow on its genital marks infection: not only physical, but mental and inherited. A threat passed down. A trauma that repeats itself unless named.
This work does not try to redeem ancestry. It does not look for closure. It aligns with Conversations With Myself by externalizing an inner debate that never resolves: how to swallow and digest what has shaped you, how to break down with care, and how to refuse purity in favor of reckoning. It is a portrait of an internal landscape where ancestry speaks through the body: even when the voice is unwanted.
