EL01 → Writings Archive Selects
*"writings" are collages; where each element acts like a word or letter, crafting pictorial stories that reinterpret our worlds.
My “writings” are collages, but I see them more like a language. Each image I cut and place is like a word
or a letter, and together they form new stories out of old ones. I use it to question what we’ve been shown and to create different ways of reading these images.
The point is to slow people down, to make them wonder about the images in front of them and the meanings behind the writings.
This isn’t the full scope of my writings, it’s just a selection meant to show the range of messages I work with.
EL01 → Albums
*“Albums” are suites of writings collected into one body, a rebrand of the classic “body of work”.
Ultra Permanent is an album of collages whos title plays on both hairstyle treatment and as a metaphor for the effort to “straighten out” ideas, things that comes out of our head.
The packaging is inspired by the visual language of vintage Black haircare brands in America like Ultra Sheen, the project uses this package language as context. The suite of works was originally housed in a paper container modeled after a perm tub, a familiar consumer object now turned into an archival vessel.
The collages themselves deal with the tension of building new narratives on top of pre-existing ones. Images from vintage magazines and ephemera are re-layered into new compositions over found Shakespeare notes.
The album is about more than hair. It’s about the costs of assimilation, and the resistance being flattened. Mimicking commercial packaging while embedding a deeply personal language, Ultra Permanent shows how Blackness is marketed, manipulated, but still able become something uncontainable.
Puber is an album of collages that redefines what the medium of collage can hold. Built on layered clear material like “film cells”, these writings grow beyond the flat page into something that requires touch.
Each piece is composed like a movie scene and similarlly layered like multitrack recordings.
At its core, PUBER is about the Black youth experience. The awkwardness of growth, weight of expectation, and the hardships of becoming visible before you are ready. By writing with figures and environments, the album highlights how identity is constantly shaped by outside forces and the gaze of “authority”.
This is an album that centers memory and nostalgia. It takes the childhood motif of the “freeze cup” (also called lily dilly in Florida) as its starting point. The title references the age I made the album while calling out the temperature of Florida’s summer, just on a different temperature scale system.
The Fem-centric writings draw from memories of the neighborhood Candy Lady. The woman who sold sweets out of her house. As an adult, I look back and wonder what drove her to do that. Was it about community and seeing us grow up, was it about survival, or both? These writings lean into privacy and survival. These writings use that memory as a way to question what compels Candy Ladies to build and sustain these small but powerful economies.
This simple block of flavored ice had the power to cool, comfort, and spark joy. Now in adulthood, that frozen treat becomes a metaphor for “nostalgic yearning” during life’s most heated and intense moments.
“28 Degrees Celsius” shows how nostalgia can be an escape and a reckoning of life at the same time. Growing older doesn’t melt away childhood, It’s now just puddled somewhere in the mind. Like freeze cups shifts from solid to liquid, Life is something always in motion, melting between states of resilience into vulnerability.
Ed Libris 2025 Miami,FL