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Hilum Drops
Gianna Christella Hayes

Hilum Drops is a digitally ritualised incantation, rooted in the aftermath of cultural erasure where ancestral knowledge is stolen but memory flickers through coded messages from plants and water. Interfaced like a survivalist video game object screen, the work reimagines the essential object for survival; not as a weapon or mechanical tool, but as a flower essence (1) made from black-eyed pea blooms.

This vial becomes an antidote to cultural disconnection: a vessel of remembrance, resistance, and return. Central to this work is the black-eyed pea (Vigna unguiculata), a seed native to West Africa that traveled the Middle Passage (2) braided into the hair of ancestors. Smuggled in secret and planted in new soils, it speaks to the quiet rebellions that carry liberatory futures. In this world, seeds are messages and maps to freedom. They bloom where memory lives.

“Hilum” is a botanical term for the scar where a seed once joined its pod. In the black-eyed pea, this scar forms its “eye”, invoking the point of connection as a portal: a scar that guides the way back. A mark of origin, a rupture, and a path home.

The soundscape weaves ambient sounds, breath and water, guiding the viewer through the sensory experience of dispensing the vial.

This work is an offering for those who feel ancestrally unrooted. It is ritual, tool, and seed. It calls forth the knowledge to persist and remember; we belonged, and we still do.

1 Flower essences are energetic waters imbued with the essence of a flower, a plant, or a place with the help of a celestial body (like the moon or sun). Essences invite deeper conversation with your consciousness and the living world around you. They are poetic and non-physical medicines that gently support emotional, spiritual, and energetic well-being. This process uses water as a bridge to hold memory, emotion, and energetic imprint.

2 The term “Middle Passage Descendants” or “Black Atlantics” refers to individuals whose ancestors were forcibly transported from Africa to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. This terminology underscores the unique hybridisation of the genetic and cultural composition of Black Americans, shaped not by a single point of origin but by the forced convergence of diverse African ethnicities, European lineages, and Native American heritage across centuries of displacement and survival.

This work is best viewed on desktop.

After taking a pause to ensure all assets have loaded, click on the Black-Eyed Pea to reveal the digital Incantation.

Gianna Christella Hayes is a multidisciplinary artist, facilitator & land tender working alongside plants, people, images and memories. Hayes’s work is informed by ethnobotanical research aiming to increase intimacy with our ecological landscapes, unseen energies and archive diasporic legacies.

Editorial : Ena Grozdanic
Digital : Giana Festa
Digital: Yanti Peng

Hilum Drops

Gianna Christella Hayes

A picture of the flower and leaves of a black eyed pea plant. The image has been edited to be styilised in duotone blue and white, with a static texture.

A close up image of plant fibers. The image has been edited to be styilised in duotone blue and white, with a static texture.

Capsules of hope.
carried,
braided,
sown.

A picture of a small box of six plant saplings, held in place on a rack against a blank wall. The image has been edited to be styilised in duotone blue and white, with a static texture.

Black-eyed bloom,
Black bloom.

Water,
The first ancestor.
The memory keeper.
The tide that remembers.

A picture of a bowl full of peas. Three sets of arms and hands are reaching in to the bowl. The image has been edited to be styilised in duotone blue and white, with a static texture.

holding us
separating us,
connecting us.

A picture of a plant. The image has been edited to be styilised in duotone blue and white, with a static texture.

I am,
a keeper of growth.

I return.
To the whispers.
To the names I do not yet know, but feel.
To the land I have never walked, but ache for.
To the hands unearthing buried lineages.

I am,
the seed.

I am,
the spell.

A tabletop with cocktail glasses filles with liquid and a metal bowl containing string beans. The image has been edited to be styilised in duotone blue and white, with a static texture.

I remember.
Even when I’ve been told to forget.

A hand holding a glass bowl with a diamond pattern, containing soft irregularly shaped flowers. The image has been edited to be styilised in duotone blue and white, with a static texture.