Root Source and Soul is a hanging matrix of reproductions of High John the Conqueror roots created in an almost daily ritual of casting paper pulp from reused fabric in a single cast of the hoodoo root. The root is named for the folk hero High John the Conquer, who, “embodies music, storytelling, and laughter as a kind of mobility, a fugitivity which others the slaves’ condition…(Mackey 268).” The roots matrix makes up a figure that floats in silence, but the audience is aware that the figure is capable of rattling when moving. The mirrored surface below breaks the stillness and silence with evidence of the figure’s ability to rattle and shake. The mirror is just a replication, a falsehood made at a different time.
The only way to make the figure move is by force, and even the audience is unable to reproduce the same repetition and disruption of the rattle depicted in the mirror. The more one would attempt to force the figure to move, the more tangled the roots become, evidence of an outside entity attempting and failing to force its will onto the root figure. There is not only a resistance in that but also a liberation through an unfixing fugivity, even in its stillness being depicted through this figure. Yes, its matrix and form can be disturbed, but the self is validated by the presence of the exterior force.
There is also the knowledge of the audience that there is an uninhabitable interior, represented by the knowledge of the figure’s movement, but their inability to access it in a present way.
