Marianetta Porter: Breath Fragment Return

Stamps Gallery, University of Michigan | Detroit, Michigan

Breath Fragment Return examines how Marianetta Porter uses everyday objects, fragments, and embodied memory to make absence an active, living presence while challenging linear histories. Rooted in African American experience, her practice treats what is discarded, overlooked, or missing not as loss, but as a source of meaning that continues to act on the present. Through impermanent materials, Porter reveals how memory is carried in the body and embedded in ordinary things. Her work also resists forward-moving notions of time, instead presenting a diasporic temporality in which past, present, and lived experience circulate together through repetition, touch, and recall. In doing so, Porter proposes a vision of history as unfinished, memory as active, and absence as a force that sustains connection and shapes the present.