What makes up The Soul? The Soul of Life? The Soul of Human History? For centuries, Western museums tried collecting, preserving, and exhibiting evidence to their answer. That answer comes at the expense of countless others, many victims of exploitative colonial museum practices that persist today. This calls for a reevaluation, a reexploration of that space, what it contains, and the stories it tell. Ferguson intervenes with a radical pastiche with an architectural traveling performance. She references contemporary aesthetics and the white cube of the museum as she reimagines them entirely with Black bodies and Black art. Going back to literal beginning of beginning, she takes inspiration from Metatron’s Cube. It is the divine design of archangel Metatron, said to demark the composition of The Flower of Life budding out of the Tree of Knowledge as detailed in Rabbinic Judaism. In this way it is a rebirth of the initial moment human perfection. Though not entirely utopian, it carries the weight of history in its exhibition.
