The artist Jasmine Nyende’s guide on blending distinct modalities of self-care.
In Jasmine Nyende’s bifurcated video the poet, musician, and artist offers a dual prompt of wellness and health. Nyende split-screen features two videos of Nyende side by side, she starts by reading on the state of the world, activism, and meditation, reimagining her city — Los Angeles — in yarn and words. Her reading is rhythmic and punctuated as if Nyende licks and seals each word enhancing their meaning. It’s a diagnostic of the state of things accompanied by an antidote of guided stretches. Inviting the viewer to move, stretch, and breathe, Nyende offers an embodied prescription of how to be with oneself instrumenting sound and breathe for relief.
Jasmine Nyende is an interdisciplinary artist from South Central Los Angeles. Through fiber-based textiles, music, performance, and writing, she holds care as a time for the body to feel supported within community, in righteous rage in motion, in joy, in honoring of our journeys with ancestors and with each other. She returns her practice to a communal space through weaving, knitting, and crochet workshops in her studio and the music of her Black queer femme & them punk band FUCK U PAY US. She is currently writing a craft book about DIY as a political and healing tool for soothing the soul and creating connections.