The 100 Day Project #24

Invisible City - No. The Language.

Tucson, Arizona, USA, 2008

The 100 Day Project, Day 24

"The language." Two words written in chalk on concrete. A fragment that is also a complete thought. Who owns it? Who gets to use it? Who gets to decide what it means?

These are not new questions. They are ancient ones.

For millennia, men have claimed language as their domain — and when women and others dared to write anyway, their words were stolen, attributed to husbands, brothers, male pen names. Their research absorbed into a male colleague's published paper. Their ideas repeated back to them in a meeting, credited to the man who said them louder. The theft has been so consistent, so normalized, that we have barely had language to describe it.

Today I discovered that a man had plagiarized a colleague's work — copy-pasting it into an AI platform that reconstructed it as his own. A newer, faster, more sophisticated version of the oldest story. The tools change. The impulse doesn't.

I have spent decades learning to write well — to communicate with precision and intention. I'm still working on finding the courage, the deep belief in my own voice, to say all that I feel compelled to state. I still overthink. I still worry about who I might upset. But I am done censoring myself.

I watch every day as men take — with impudence, without apology — words and ideas and credit that are not theirs. I will continue to disrupt and disabuse them of their unearned accolades and faked insight. The pieces of their ego can fall where gravity places them.

There is a word in the upper corner of this frame that most viewers don't notice right away. "No." It sits there quietly while the eye moves to the hand, to the chalk, to the words being written. And then — eventually, almost as an afterthought — you see it. A single word. A complete sentence. Already there before the writing began.

Yet the "No." disrupts. It surprises the viewer. It complicates the viewing, the understanding or interpretation of the photograph.

It is the "No." that I love most about this image. Its mere presence is a quiet disruption. Much like I am. I call myself a pragmatic disruptor — born with an innate sense of justice and independence. A deep sense of equity. A love of the power of being a woman who creates, who documents the world as I experience it.

The "No." was written first. It will be written again, and again, and again, and again — for millennia more, until women, and all those whose voices have been excluded, silenced, stolen, or ignored, choose to no longer write it because it is no longer necessary for them to employ it’s power.

The hand in this photograph belongs to T.C. Tolbert — poet, transgender activist, and former poet laureate of Tucson, Arizona. T.C.’s career is beautifully complicated demonstration that language is not merely a tool of expression. It is an act of survival. To name yourself, to insist on your own story in the face of a culture determined to erase it, is one of the most radical things a person can do.

When I lived in Tucson, I had the privilege of collaborating with T.C. on several youth-centered community arts programs, and supported his launch of “Made for Flight” — a public art and civic rights project that created kites bearing the names of transgender people who had been murdered, flown during ceremonies marking the Transgender Day of Visibility. Language, words used in elegy.

"The language." It belongs to all of us. I am here to claim it — and to make sure no one takes it from you.

I made this photograph during The Invisible City — a five-week, site-specific experimental arts lab exploring public space in downtown Tucson. Co-directed by Lisa Bowden, the project was a collaboration between NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre and Kore Press, a Tucson-based feminist press. More than 20 women artists came together to create texts, dances, sound pieces, film, photographs, and drawings within the urban core — envisioning and activating new workspaces out of vacant parking lots, city plazas, and sidewalks.

About the 100 Day Project: A global creative challenge where thousands of artists share a piece of their practice every single day for 100 days. I'm joining creatives around the world, and I'm excited to bring you along. Each day I'll be sharing one of my photos — some recent, some old, and some from my current project — along with the story behind it: where I was, who I was with, and why I love it.