AALTERITY. collaging Mississippi medicine & the wisdom of surrender with apprentice, Nana Kumi
AALTERITY.
A photographic collage using analogue images taken in Utica, Mississippi. The collage features images of Nana in different prayer gestures as well as sites on the land that invoke the medicine of rural Mississippi. This offering was constructed as a visual alter to the medicine I experienced in the circle: natural immersion. Rural places often offer the deep presence and slowness the circle offered.
How have you watched the seed of your intention grow on the living altar of your practice? How have you been changed by your practice? How have you been risking or healing for Liberation?
Being in FREEDOM LAND’s Mindfulness and Healing Justice Cohort has expanded my understanding of what it means to be an apprentice. I came into this space holding some inherited ideas about apprenticeship, and through the slow, intentional medicine of the cohort, I began to release the resistance to unlearn colonial expectations of mastery, speed, and performance.
Decolonizing my role as an apprentice meant softening and trusting the circle. I began to understand apprenticeship as a deep surrender to wisdom. I let myself be guided by the medicine of presence. Something that doesn’t always feel accessible without resistance.
By choosing to stay present—even when I was uncomfortable I allowed the medicine of the cohort to do its work in me. I remembered that receiving is a courageous act of trust and receptivity. Through this, I’ve experienced how healing justice is not only about what we do, but how we allow ourselves to be changed, witnessed, and nourished by each other.
I am learning that the work is not to arrive somewhere, but to be here.
This is how we create the new medicine that our world so deeply needs.
Nana Kumi (she/her)
Featured Apprentice for FREEDOM LAND’s Mindfulness & Healing Justice Cohort
Instagram: @nanakumiart x @gholdenalchemy
website: nanakumi.art
Nana Kumi is a queer black southern artist, emerging filmmaker, spiritual herbalist, and land steward from Natchez, Mississippi. Her visual work translates the language of plants, visions, and dreams into naturalist and afro-surrealist landscapes as activation sites for re-remembering. Nana completes her work through several mediums: analog photography, film, collective narrative, and installation, weaving together Black American Southern traditions and West African spiritual lineages to create containers for rest, co-dreaming, and radical imagination.
