Water.

Water as memory.

Water as ancient technology.

I am the vessel—water within me—and the goal is Reverse Osmo(cis): the undoing of empire, patriarchal colonialism, all the isms and phobias, and the white imagination imposed on African queer bodies—and ultimately all African bodies.

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My entire artistic career has been an interrogation of performance as a tool of dominant culture: a mechanism used to distract, manipulate, and coerce. No matter the discipline—acting, writing, directing, design, modeling, visual art—I return the work to the water ancestrally. Through me, embodied, it moves to the cloud and back down to The Watering W(hole). The cycle repeats, returning me and my ancestry home.

Reverse Osmo(cis).

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Water has always marked my life. I was created in water, made of water—and born with water in my lungs. My first days were spent in an incubator, tethered to machines, being taught how to breathe. Being reminded I was human.

And not part fish.

Except I was both.

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This was my first initiation as a child of Mami Wata.

My mother—knowingly or not—offered me to Mami Wata for safe passage through this life. She feared water deeply, as her ancestral record taught her to. Our ancestors rest at the bottom of an angry sea. While colonizers contorted nature to meet their needs, the tech(know)logy—the water, the earth—remembered. The truth remains.

My artistic practice disrupts and heals ancestrally. It restores the embodied truth of a body, a thing, a people.

What we see in Black queer America is a s(hell) still manipulated in the name of white power, cultural clout, and theft—a foreign skin made permanent. It holds no memory. It is shiny, hollow, and we are taught to crave it. But when your hands touch sand and the waves baptize you, Mami Wata whispers: we have been here before. it is time to wake up.

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African bodies have always been inherently quee(a)r in the face of imposed order. Very little in nature is linear. We are the earth’s original children—lines are for those without belonging. We belong. We have never been alone.

This is a practice of letting the body lead. Of retraining it to turn inward during fear and crisis. Of welcoming back the fractured selves we created to survive. Returning them to the w(hole). Allowing ancestors and spirit to transform original sin into (see)d—fertile soil, oceans, cosmoses within us.

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My life’s work is restoring my African body to its fullness and shedding the many s(hells required for survival in this cistem—one that thrives on anti-Blackness while stealing Black culture and selling it back to us cheaply. Beneath those s(hells), protected by water, lives an ancient ancestral flower ready to bloom. This is the work I embody.

The Spirit of Intimacy by Sobonfu Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa by Malidoma Patrice Somé and Riotous Deathscapes by Hugo Ka Canham along with others are a foundational texts for me.

 

My lens is a trans praxis that asks: How do you actually meet yourself? We claim community is the answer while skipping the work of self. There is no community without tending the one within—through intention, care, trial, error, and devotion.

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I work with plant wellness, ritual, and fungi as technologies of healing and memory restoration. We are the tech(know)ology. I am the technology. A child of ancestors and spirit. The water moves through me—and now, it is time to return.

Home feels impossible only because we were taught to forget it.

To be African.

To be Black.

Is to be inherently quee(a)r.

We will dissolve colonial lines and restore community, care, and sovereignty. We must remember the technology.

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Kiing Curry is a multidisciplinary Afrikan artist, educator, and designer with over 20 years of experience across theatre, film, visual art, design, technology, and embodiment practices. Their work centers Black liberation, ancestral memory, and decolonized care. Curry has collaborated with NPR, HuffPost, Bad Queers Podcast, Black Beauty School, Good Dye Young, Eloquii (Black Creators Project), and more.

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Curry engages decolonized Afro hair practice, healing plant wellness, and jewelry design (Bead & Cowrie) as tools of sovereignty and protection—returning Black bodies to communal care and ancestral power.

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In Summer 2026, Kiing Curry and their partner Siir Cole will launch The Dom(Free) S(cool)—an innovative incubator and nonverbal exploration of embodiment, community-building, restorative justice and collective care.