Waiting for Hurricane Irma

I am in Sarasota, Florida, waiting for a hurricane named Irma, born on the desert plains of North Africa, en route to my state and possibly to my city with record speeds and massive body size, and with the prophetic expectation of great destruction and mayhem. If I listen to the news too much, I will believe that I will be floating in the Gulf of Mexico soon, with no cell phone bars to call home and with my last memories of Facebook friends telling me to be safe. The weather forecasters, after a while, become unbearable and start sounding like information sadists feeding off the excitement of delivering deadly news—all with maps, satellite photos, and multicolored mathematical modeled paths of annihilation. I stay glued to the weather channel hoping for clues that Irma might go elsewhere, for this is one lottery I do not want to win.

The last time I wrote about a big storm, it was a metaphorical one on the Confederate pushback. In this piece, I talk about the reactive, Trump-induced Alt-Reich movement and my sixteen-year project, Recoloration Proclamation, a collection of recolored flags, installations, music, performative texts, and film that examines and responds to the “hurricane” of Confederacy and its sign, symbols, and cataclysm of white supremacy tried and