Using colonial and Biafran currency as surfaces for images of Black women dancing, Twerk Cartographies considers currency as a site where value, ownership and power are constructed. Placing dancing Black women onto currency interrupts colonial economic logic, proposing movement, rhythm and embodied pleasure as alternative forms of value.

The work connects to the practice of spraying money during celebrations across many African cultures, where money is placed on or showered over dancing bodies as a gesture of honour and celebration. I am interested in how this choreography shifts across the African diaspora. In Black strip club cultures in the United States, for example, throwing money or “making it rain” carries echoes of this gesture. Rather than tracing a direct lineage, the work considers how these forms of money choreography travel, fracture and reassemble through diasporic memory.

THE question becomes:

How does money move through Black histories?
What kinds of value are produced when the Black dancing body becomes a site of circulation rather than extraction?

The postage stamp extends this enquiry towards questions of memory and commemoration. Historically, stamps have functioned as miniature monuments, circulating images chosen by the state and determining who is remembered and granted permanence within the national imagination. By replacing colonial imagery with early 2000s video vixens, I propose an alternative archive of remembrance, treating Black feminine performance and cultural labour as worthy of commemoration.

I deliberately leave the colonial structure of the stamp visible. Rather than erasing imperial history, the work inhabits its visual language and unsettles it from within. Twerk Cartographies therefore moves between circulation, commemoration and contamination, asking whose images are circulated, whose bodies are valued, and whose histories are preserved.