“I am all of them, they are all of me…”

— Etheridge Knight, The Idea of Ancestry

InThe Way Our Tongues Move, I depict family recollections from the life of an uncle whose personal biography reflects the larger Gay Liberation Movement of twentieth-century America. Through this project, I act as a medium, embodying kindred memory through portraiture and performance. I work both behind and in front of the lens to reflect the self as a microcosm of an ancestral collective. Each photographic, textile, and video portrait is born from extensive research, mining the archives of family lore, and aligning these oral accounts against available historical documentation.