TRAP : TRAUMA : TRANSFORMATION
GREENLING INSTITUTE
OAKLAND CALIFORNIA USA 2019
‘Divide and Rule’ reflects on the cycle of violence and its roots in the divided and rule of British colonialism // TRAP : TRAUMA : TRANSFORMATION OAKLAND 2019 // A project working with the community of Oakland California and international artists curated by Rohan De Costa and Harriet Poznansky
My installation Divide and Rule reflects on the cycle of violence produced when power is maintained by keeping communities in conflict rather than in solidarity, a strategy rooted in British colonialism and echoed in contemporary American politics in cities like Oakland.
In Oakland, redlining, aggressive policing, gang injunctions, and unequal development have fragmented neighborhoods along racial and economic lines, turning everyday public space into a terrain of surveillance and control rather than safety.
These conditions feed cycles of trauma: generations experience dispossession, incarceration, and state violence, while media narratives frame communities as “dangerous” rather than structurally abandoned.
By staging weapons, barriers, and ritual objects together like a WW2 helmet encrusted with bullets, an axe-gun hybrid, and a turtle-crowned target, the work asks how fear is manufactured and traded as political currency.
From “tough on crime” campaigns to the Black Panther patrols that challenged them and how this keeps people divided even when they share the same streets and struggles. Installed first in Oakland with local and international collaborators like The Greenlining Institute, the project reflects on this city as a frontline in an ongoing experiment in social control, but also as a site of resistance where grassroots movements, mutual aid, and coalition politics from Panther free breakfasts to today continually reimagine how trauma can be transformed into collective power.
