Republica: Temple of Color and Sound

Kristina Kay Robinson (b. 1983, New Orleans, United States; based in New Orleans)
"Republica: Temple of Color and Sound" 2018-present
Sound installation
Collection of the artist

In January 1811, eight years after France was forced by the loss of Haiti, its most profitable colony, to sell Louisiana to the United States, hundreds of people held captive on plantations along the Mississippi River of southeast Louisiana revolted against the planter class. It was not the first uprising against enslavers in the region where the ocean that connects the Old World to the New meets the river that allowed the United States to manifest its colonizing “destiny,” but in the fictitious world that foregrounds artist Kristina Kay Robinson’s installation Temple of Color and Sound, it is the only successful one. After capturing New Orleans, per the artist’s alternative history, the revolutionaries continue east through coastal Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida until reaching the Atlantic, abolishing slavery in the deepest south decades before the American Civil War and severing the United States’ access to the continent’s second largest port. Republica, home to Robinson’s alter ego Maryam de Capita, is the nation-within-a-nation born of the insurrection’s imagined success. As an ambassador of Republica, de Capita travels the installation around the world, engaging devotees in ritual, prayer, and intellectual dialogue about the personal and global implications of white supremacist patriarchal imperialism, from experiences of sexual abuse to political unrest in far-flung countries. The Temple is a space for healing. Pre-COVID-19, visitors gathered before its elaborate layers of candles, fabrics, religious icons, books, and other relics, as De Capita provided entertainment and conversation. Now that a global pandemic has compounded the travel restrictions Republica faces, she must send the temple and her own image in two-dimensional form.

This artwork is an ontological reckoning that challenges viewers’ beliefs about the nature of reality. As COVID-19 and international political unrest in response to state-sanctioned violence lay bare the disparities in life chances between the descendants of colonizers and the colonized, The Temple beckons viewers to peer beyond the veil.

By Lydia Y. Nichols (based in New Orleans)