Deftly weaving together appropriated film and video clips, graphics, music, and text, Mitrani takes the viewer on a hypnotic odyssey through histories both personal and expansive. This five-minute fever-dream collage of idols, influences, and inspirations—including her father, samba singer Elza Soares, artist-theorist Kodwo Eshun, and science-fiction writer Octavia Butler—evolved out of Mitrani’s experiences with Iboga, an entheogenic root bark, in Gabon.

Feminist, ecological, and speculative, To Reincarnate as a Palm Tree offers a powerful conception of a proliferating cosmic consciousness, an attempt to acknowledge and explore the multiple viewpoints that inform her own diasporic subjectivity.

Mitrani’s vision is fluid and transversal, the product of interlocking hemispheres outside the Euro-North American axis.

The video was initially commissioned for the exhibition “Universos Desdoblados” (Unfolding Universes) as part of the 45th Salón Nacional de Artistas in Bogotá, Colombia. The exhibition presented a range of work that imagined alternate realities, suppressed histories, and possible futures.

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This project was presented at OCD Chinatown, 

December 12, 2019–January 20, 2020

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