Naomi Hubert

AIR N&M My practice moves between disciplines and thresholds: fiction and lived experience, language, sound and materiality, the domestic and the public. Rooted in intersectional feminism and informed by my bicultural background, I use storytelling, speculative imagination, and autofiction to question and re-enchant hegemonic Western belief systems. Research, writing, moving image, illustration, and performative gestures are central to my work, often feeding into one another through iterative processes. During my residency at AIR N&M, I will build upon an essay developed during my master’s studies at Sandberg Instituut, titled Can the tumbleweed speak? A longing to being. In this ongoing research, the tumbleweed is both the subject and methodological approach. Through the etymology of diaspora, I learned about the tumbleweed as the botanical concept of a diaspore: a plant structure that disperses seeds through movement. Once detached from its root, the tumbleweed becomes fully subjected to wind and terrain. Historically, the tumbleweed arrived in the United States from Eurasia through accidental dispersal, mixed into shipments of flaxseed, and later classified as an “invasive species.” This history allows me to examine how systems of classification, displacement, and othering operate across human, plant, and planetary life. The tumbleweed’s unanchored motion, as well as its role within the mythology of the cowboy and the “Wild West,” becomes a lens through which migration, belonging, mythology and colonization are entangled and can be reimagined. During the residency, I will expand on my writing alongside visual work toward a future publication that brings text and image together. I plan to produce illustrations, material sketches, and visual studies that may develop into autonomous works, as well as drafts or storyboards. Central to this process is an interest in tumbling as a methodology: exploring how movement itself can generate narrative and form. The concluding exhibition will bring this research together in an installation format while these experiments will also lay the groundwork for longer-term moving-image work.