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Of Cotton, Clay, and Water: A Black retelling of the Anthropocene narrative (2026) Main Menu Beginning with the ending The Vase Complete This retelling operates on polychronic time Clay as narrative/law Growing cotton Black textile lifecycles The Trans*atlantic, blue space racism, and Flint, Michigan: Water as a means of oppression Clay as a finite element “To freedom", jumping ship, and following rivers: Water as a site of freedom Clay as a memory (archive) Ending with a beginning

final vase gif

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see the vase complete page to view the vase in full! Evelyn Logan
Contents of this annotation:
1. final vase gif

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Of Cotton, Clay, and Water: A Black retelling of the Anthropocene narrative
Of Cotton, Clay, and Water: A Black retelling of the Anthropocene narrative by Evelyn Logan focuses on Black descendants of the Trans*Atlantic slave trade in America, centering the retelling around their pasts, presents, and futures. Cotton, clay, and water guide the project, acting as a framework for interpreting the narrative and site for analysis and hacking. Read in order or click on a chapter that interests you -->
Beginning with the ending "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?"
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (Broken Earth Trilogy)

Black worlds end all the time without reason or warning... if the end is all the time, where do we begin?

This retelling of the Anthropocene narrative centers Black people and through their lives, hardships, and stories, the contours of this epoch are revealed. Starting with the end doesn't mean focusing on the largest ending, the Trans*Atlantic Slave Trade and the genocide that carried on for 200 years, but instead this retelling acknowledges all of the little endings that have carried on throughout our time on the earth. In doing so, it embraces Yusoff's concept of a Black Anthropocene.

Kathryn Yusoff outlines this concept neatly in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None:
"Another way to conceive this would be to understand Blackness as a historically constituted and intentionally enacted deformation in the formation of subjectivity, a deformation that presses an inhuman categorization and the inhuman earth into intimacy... At the same time, this forced intimacy with the inhuman was repurposed for survival and formed into a praxis for remaking other selves that were built into the harshest of conditions. The proximity of black and brown bodies to harm in this intimacy with the inhuman is what I am calling Black Anthropocenes."
xii, Preface, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None clearly defines Black Anthropocenes and unpacks how White Geology misses an important part of the story when it doesn't consider race. This project builds directly upon Yusoff's scholarship, asserting alongside her that a Black Anthropocene is essential to understanding the era we are in currently.

While this project does have a written component (that which you are reading currently), the retelling itself is happening in a vase. The vase retells the story without any words and in doing so becomes its own archive in order to address archival silences and correct misleading narratives. The project begins with an image of the vase (the end), and works backwards to a lump of clay (the beginning). This written aspect of the project will reveal just how the retelling came to be.

see the vase completed

(setting up and installing)