How can jewelry be a tool for Black liberation?
This question guides what I create in my apartment studio, where I work with hand tools alongside two domestic milling machines. Since 2019, these tools and machines have enabled my facecraft: the production of metal hair ornaments for Black people that I call headcrests. They feature a novel way of affixing metal to afro-textured hair. Once only visible in my dreams, headcrests follow the legacy of Black head adornment, and are powered in their meaning when interfaced with Black bodies and our inborn expressions of freedom. I fashion them as a form of afro-functional beaconry that signifies this embodied freedom and beckons others into proximity. Afrofuturism is now, and through this signalling function, a Black individual may be more readily understood as an actor of Afrofuturism in the present. In proliferating the headcrest as a Black technological prop of the Afrofuture, I hope to energize our collective ability to glitch now into an epoch of liberation.
Qil Jones
Metalbender + Machinewitch
from West Philly
This question guides what I create in my apartment studio, where I work with hand tools alongside two domestic milling machines. Since 2019, these tools and machines have enabled my facecraft: the production of metal hair ornaments for Black people that I call headcrests. They feature a novel way of affixing metal to afro-textured hair. Once only visible in my dreams, headcrests follow the legacy of Black head adornment, and are powered in their meaning when interfaced with Black bodies and our inborn expressions of freedom. I fashion them as a form of afro-functional beaconry that signifies this embodied freedom and beckons others into proximity. Afrofuturism is now, and through this signalling function, a Black individual may be more readily understood as an actor of Afrofuturism in the present. In proliferating the headcrest as a Black technological prop of the Afrofuture, I hope to energize our collective ability to glitch now into an epoch of liberation.
Qil Jones
Metalbender + Machinewitch
from West Philly