Have you heard of this multicultural performance artist, Cyd-Kassandra? Her message is so thought-provoking and beautiful! While Western culture tends to sterilize culture for mass-appeal, Cyd-Kassandra believes we should look at culture differently. Instead of being culture-less, we should be culture-full!
The caption of this video:
When I speak about cultural sterility, I am naming a particular Western anxiety: an incurious sensitivity, even hostility, toward anything overtly decorative, ethnic, or excessive. Colour and ornament are often treated as suspicious, unserious, or regressive. David Batchelor ( @chromochrome ) articulates this precisely in his book “Chromophobia”, which I would highly recommend, where colour is historically cast as feminine, crafted, or aligned with the global majority, and therefore pushed to the margins of so-called high culture. My practice moves deliberately against this fear. I draw inspiration from other cultures because I am genuinely curious about the world, its rituals, textiles, symbols, and stories. This outfit would not exist without Indian practices and devotional aesthetics. I describe myself as a syncretic dresser because syncretism relates to my sustained attention towards the World. Through performance, costume, makeup, and dance, I aim to reframe syncretism as an earnest, studied practice rather than a vague New Age flattening of difference. The work moves through yearning toward resolution, imagining a speculative society grounded in care, curiosity, and deep fascination rather than surface-level borrowing.
Her instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skiyodu/