Double Consciousness Infinity Mirror (Doula Nicky Dawkins)

Doula Nicky Dawkins (Mama Spa Botanica collaborator) is infinitely reflected 9 months pregnant as she prepares for labor on the front lines of the birthing justice crisis crowning in Miami during the 2021 corona virus pandemic, where doulas are forbidden from delivery rooms. Nicky describes the infinite burden of double consciousness when birthing in America as a black Jamaican doula during a conversation with the artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer. The street installation documents their intimate conversation concluding in the Infinite Double Consciousness maxim: Be Your Own Mom to survive. Infinitely reproduce agency, confidence and self-hood to bear the burden of laboring and delivering offspring, a black mother must preserve herself as an umbilical extension of community care. The installation imagines our procreative surveillance as a site for political discourse for biological and biographical family structures. The "female" fetus is born with all their eggs: a womb with an infinite view of the uterus, ancient offspring and ancestors.

Nicky's reproductive justice work and image resists violent stigmas and advertising archetypes using her life-saving doula and direct action advocacy work with vulnerable bodies or organizations like Period Miami, Southern Birth Justice Network and Miami Diaper Bank. Despite the invisibility of low income Q+BIPOC, immigrant, reproductive health communities from our fertile city's conscience, her ancestral cultural preservation improves the material conditions of maternal health crisis survivors and their families. In Nicky’s words, “Hospitals are doing to black mothers on the labor wards what police are doing to our men on the streets”.

Double Consciousness Infinity Mirror (Doula Nicky Dawkins) is an exterior installation in the storefront of Greenspace Miami on US1 across from Jimmy's Diner where historic legislation embattling Q+BIPOC communities was forged and the location for a classic scene where 2 lovers meet in the film "Moonlight".