Privilege or Privileged

Our body is the beginning of all experiences, the one aspect of ourselves and our identity that others get to experience first. Our bodies also belong to a world of social constructs, a world that we aren’t fully in control of, but a world that we all must navigate. The social construct persuades our mind to divide the unique and indivisible part of ourselves into small pieces that can then fit in a social category. In today’s America, being Black or White is a primordial question that social construct has erected before us. Having privilege or not seemingly emanates from that basic racial categorization rigidly created to reinforce privilege.

From privilege a series of assumptions flow unrestricted. Deeply-rooted assumptions that engender indelible stereotypes in our collective unconsciousness. Our existence is on one hand defined by the very real constructed experience of privilege, and on the other hand determined by our body, not as an arbitrary biological assignment, but as a symbol and incarnation of privilege or lack thereof. Privilege or Privileged is the first part of a series of space installations created to provide a meditative space to think about the construct of privilege. In this iteration black and brown women are the focus. Their voices describe a kind of experience within the privilege construct and the visual immerses the viewer to recreate the feeling of what privilege induces.