Exploring the histories surrounding the Midwest’s silk production, focusing on its colonial scars. My research is rooted in the examination of how species adapt to non native environments and the ethical implications of being brought to land against their will and intertwining physical research with post-colonial theory regarding the ethics of invasiveness.
The foundation of this research lies in the sericulture of silk worms raised entirely on Detroit-grown mulberry leaves, tracking the way each generation adapts due to their environment and food sources and become biologically attuned to Detroit’s cultivar of mulberry.
This work emerges from my sustained engagement with the silkworm and the white mulberry tree, two species brought to North America as part of an industrial experiment that never fully succeeded. The Bombyx Mori silkworm has been bred for centuries to produce silk, stripped of its flight, color, and survival mechanisms until it can no longer exist without human care. Its counterpart, the white mulberry, planted to sustain it, escaped cultivation, adapted, and naturalized across the Midwest, even as it continues to be labeled invasive.
I approach both the silkworm and the mulberry as living archives of displacement, labor, and survival. I tend to my silkworms daily, feeding them fresh mulberry leaves, recording their growth, isolating the sick, and memorializing those that pass. I prune the trees that nourish them, keeping their leaves and transforming the discarded branches into paper and charcoal. This cycle of feeding, burning, and making attempts to close the circuit between care, material, and history.
The work reflects on how species shaped by human economies continue to endure, and on how the language of invasiveness and nuisance echoes the treatment of marginalized communities. By attending to these interdependent lives, I seek not to replicate the conditions of production but to understand them. This practice is an act of care and of witnessing. It is about slowing down, learning what has been overlooked, and making visible the fragile, persistent networks of survival that remain.
