It happened at approximately 2:40am.
"A really good break is a type of finishing. A beginning. A call toward devotion."
In a late-night bout of melodic insomnia, I'm hyper-aware that I have been away from home for a month now, yet I can’t tell the difference between a month, a week, a day, and yesterday, or how and when it becomes tomorrow. I don’t know my time here, but I know I am present. Not knowing my time is a doubled intimacy and knowing. A material, but complex privilege.
Is this nurturing my time instead? Pursuing my time? Reveling in my time?
More open and falling delicately into my solace. More wanting and of spirit than I am of flesh, and more dreams than I am of circumstances. I have been rupturing my time, which feels indulgent because breakage and abruption somehow feel erotic, don’t they? But lasting, and malleable. Supple and yielding on my terms.
A really good break is a type of finishing. A beginning. A call toward devotion.
On my third night here, the glare of a full moon abruptly woke me out of my sleep. She reminded me that I have to contend with my excessive impulses, always yearning for revelation and its surprises. My eyes were left salty and soft from weeping, because even in the face of the moon, revelation still has yet to arrive. I immediately recorded the event in one of my journals the next day. The palpability of it required a record. Every observation afterward has felt like a memory that either revisits me with ecstasy and satisfaction or finds me in a state of discomfort, sometimes torment, to taunt me or to show me, wanted and unwanted visions of myself - dramatic but telling. Either way I adore it all, which comes with it’s own gentleness.
I have to admit, there’s immense gratification in being enveloped by my own nuances, that echo back to me “surrender” and “be overcome.”
For brief moments, I have become fully illegible, claiming myself as such, a tethered transcendence between ground and sky, heavy and earthly, even when I’ve left my body. A negotiation of myself that is visceral and lively, slow and rewarding. I’ve teased it out as salvation. A relief. A release. A retelling. A rise from anything not holy. I’m truly insatiable to myself in this way.
Set/let/turn loose – the kind of honesty that moves freely when I will it to. A practice, and my preferred work ethic.
It all has me idolizing my own water. What I’ve made of myself is too all-encompassing - me and yet not all me. I’ve been thinking about the traceable and untraceable desires of my mothers, and my mother’s mothers, and their mothers. They are here. They are the only enclosures I make myself readily available to. An opaque enclave that follows in my briefness, now sudden readiness. I find myself evading time in the ways they knowingly and unknowingly casted upon me, tracing the origin story of the dreams and visions that have made me this way. My ancestor's blessings are binds that I’ve been entrusted to stretch out and rework. I walk through the streets here, not treading my steps lightly at all, but with absolution. I’ve made my walks profound, because I am not the only one being made and remade.
A sobering freedom that is now more bold and fluid, because I’ve forgiven things that are not mine to forgive.
I am indebted to my own transience. I revere it, with reverie — it’s light and it’s thrilling, sometimes spiteful, at times burdensome, because I’m unable to detach myself from the relations of things seen and unseen. Acute consciousness is so timeless, as both a blessing and a curse - curved, coiled, and always caught up. My sensitivities are intrinsic and inseparable.
In my rapture, many horizons have overlapped here. Thankfully, I have not kept count.
- z
zndo studio updates
I’ve been away on an artist residency here in Cassis, France with generosity from the Camargo Foundation and 3Arts. Cassis is located in the south of France, about 40 minutes outside of Marseille, and the residency is situated right beside the Mediterranean Sea — a dream!



This experience has been absolutely serendipitous, not only for me but for my practice, given my poetic attention to water and horizon lines over the past four years. Although I feel very privileged to be in residence, it initially felt like a risk, especially since I transitioned out of my full-time job as Public Programs and Engagement Manager at South Side Community Art Center last month. It's a risk in the reality that anytime we choose to center our careers as artists, however long it may be, it is truly a step into the unknown! Until my next major step (more on that at another time), this makes me more available for art commissions, portrait and photo requests, gathering footage for a short film project, spending time with those I love, and preparing myself for what is ahead of me. In the meantime, this also makes me more vulnerable, financially and emotionally. So PLEASE keep me booked and busy this summer!
I’ve been spending my days here making new photo images on 35mm and 120mm film in the form of landscapes and self-portraiture, in addition to collecting film footage of the surrounding environment. This extended body of work, which comes out of this series, is deeply related to concepts of embodiment and interiority in service to poetics and queerness. I'm thinking through these alongside writers such as Kevin Quashie, Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry, Édouard Glissant, Lucille Clifton, and Ladi'Sasha Jones. I am also indebted to Harlem Renaissance-era poets Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Angelina Weld Grimké, Mae V. Cowdery, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett. Alongside my own independent readings and materials, I have been sourcing and researching the works of other photographic artists and queer writers at Camargo Foundation’s onsite library. It has all been wonderful, restorative, and rich, to say the least. My days are my own, and I’ve been able to immerse myself in long teased out ideas and thoughts, while dedicating my time to the things that make me feel most alive and present. In the coming months ahead, i’ll be sharing more of what has come out of this residency, in terms of new photographs and general realizations about my engagement with work.



Last month, I participated in a multi-site exhibition, as part the Chicagoland Seen grant commission, which I received last year along with 2 other Chicago photo-based artists. The commission was funded by the Chicago chapter of the Albertine Foundation (fka Villa Albertine), in partnership with the Consulate General of France in Chicago and Terra Foundation for American Art.
Opening Passages: Photographers Respond to Chicago and Paris brings together the perspectives of ten emerging French and American artists whose works explore the dynamic social landscapes of Chicago and Paris.
The main exhibition showcases all of our work at the Chicago Cultural Center, along with three other venues and community spaces around the city― 6018North, BUILD Chicago, and Experimental Station ― that are hosting smaller installations, featuring our work in public space, selected for their resonance with the neighborhoods in which these institutions are located. Additional photographers include Marzena Abrahamik, Jonathan Castillo, Tonika Lewis Johnson, and Sasha Phyars-Burgess. The French artists include Gilberto Güiza-Rojas, Karim Kal, Assia Labbas, Marion Poussier, and Rebecca Topakian.
I continue to extend my gratitude to curators Carl Fuldner & Clément Postec, and lead organizer Axelle Moleur. Special shoutouts to Mandela Hudson for custom framing my work, and Josué Esau Romero Velasquez for building a set of platforms (below), as part of my commission!

A scenic view of Lake Michigan from the Chicago shoreline may not seem like the basis for a socially radical work of art, but this is precisely the kind of quiet interventions into historically freighted domains of visual culture, such as landscape art, that zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal stages through her work. The artist combines still and moving images of bodies of water with archival images drawn from her own family and other community-built collections on Chicago’s South Side. Through these visual juxtapositions, dumas-o’neal engages in creative world-making, forwarding an aesthetic vision that finds a parallel in philosopher Kevin Quashie’s concept of “Black aliveness.” At its heart, this approach seeks to abandon the pervasive—though often implicit—frame of anti Blackness that shapes so much of the contemporary discourse on race. As artistic meditations trained on self-realization and personal sovereignty, her works do not ignore the cultural prevalence of anti-Black racism; instead, they challenge anti Blackness as a default position that permeates our culture. To cite Quashie, “An anti Black world expects Blackness from Black people; in a Black world, what we expect and get from Black people is “beingness.”
Through the visual grammar of gesture and landscape, these works point to the burden of history while also seeking to move beyond. In the artist’s words, the work “highlights the ways Black aliveness and interiority show up through vivid poetic observations of my relationship to the land, time, and the sublime—that my being and gaze isn’t inherently tied to trauma, marginality, or colonization, but at times beyond it.” In this way, dumas-o’neal is invested above all in being.
–Carl Fuldner, Curator.

ON VIEW UNTIL AUGUST 24 — please go see it if you haven’t. Commentary, reflections, and thoughts are welcomed.
Thank you to Mrittika Ghosh & jackson roach for their thoughtful and deeply engaging reflection of the exhibition, published here with Sixty Inches From Center.
considerations
Toward Nakba As a Legal Concept by Rabea Eghbariah. Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the violent and forced displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands, in order to establish the state of Israel, in 1948.
This brief but eloquent interview with film artist John Akomfrah from Shade art podcast.
Jerrod Carmichael on Talk Easy podcast with Sam Fragoso. A lot can be said about Jerrod’s MESS, but this was quite generous, sweet, and honest.
New song updates on my Tides and The House Spotify playlists (best listened on shuffle).
Isra Rene’s In Absentia, from Issue 2 of Jupiter Magazine. Sink into it.
As always, thank you for subscribinggg 🖤