“It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel” is a photography project that utilizes archival fragments, historic ephemera, and my own images to focus on individual stories of slaves, maroons, and runaways whose existence is only now revealed through traces in the collective archive. This project works to expand narratives about the Black experience and our connection to the “American” landscape. This work has been guided by local historic archives of runaway slave ads, lynching news articles, Black folklore and other location specific historical events.
Maroons were enslaved people who had escaped their captors, but did not flee to the North. Instead they choose to create a life in hard to access swamps or in the wild spaces between plantations. The survival strategies and techniques the maroons used to survive in the ungoverned space between plantations can be thought of as “freedom practices.” Through these recently reclaimed threads of stories, we can begin to radically re-envision Black people’s connection to the American landscape.
This project starts in the hidden world of the southern borderland of the US and gives voice to maroons who lived in the margins of plantations in the 18th century, and reaches across time to present-day counties surrounding New Bern, NC, established in 1710. Historically, the port city of New Bern's location on the coast made it a hub for the historic trade of human beings. This region, rich with important historical moments, is extremely relevant as one of the earliest colonized spaces in the United States.