Looking back at my work with Afronaut Media and AVW (Audio Visual Wellness) in 2023 and 2024, Kitsch & KIN remains one of my favorite experiments in what can happen when an audience is invited not simply to witness art—but to become part of its making.

Conceived and produced by Jalila Bell, Kitsch & KIN was an interactive installation and audience-participation experience exploring memory, attachment, release, and collective creation.

The project grew out of my first collage-art collection, MYE{Ph}emera, and a simple question:

What will you bring to the table?

For AVW Berkeley, I expanded the intimate practice behind MYE{Ph}emera into a communal creative experiment. Afronaut Media supporters and AVW participants were invited to arrive carrying something small: a piece of kitsch, memorabilia, ephemera, or some other tiny possession carrying a memory, association, history, or meaning.

Then came the harder invitation:

Let it go.

Objects that had once belonged to separate people and separate lives were gathered at the table and transformed through a cathartic process of creative up-cycling. Individual fragments became collective material—incorporated into a singular, evolving work of Afro-futurist collage art created for the AVW experience.

Kitsch & KIN was part installation, part thought experiment, part ritual of release.

What happens when something personally treasured leaves our possession but not our history? What new meaning can an object acquire when it becomes part of somebody else's story—or a story made collectively?

The finished work became an artifact of the people who gathered around it: strangers, collaborators, artists, supporters, and community members literally contributing pieces of their lives to something none of us could have created alone.

That was the experiment.

That was Kitsch & KIN.

Concept, Creative Direction & Production: Jalila Bell
Presented with Afronaut Media as part of AVW — Audio Visual Wellness | 2023–2024