This video is a shortened, looped version of Alexa’s self-directed collaboration with New Orleans–based cinematographer Hennen Payne, special effects coordinator Sami Belle, and production assistant Will West.

The work reckons with the silent violence of erasure inflicted by centuries of colonial impact. Through layered imagery, Alexa reveals parallel truths — authenticity, radical vulnerability, and the courage to expose wounds often kept hidden.

Reclaiming selfhood and culture demands carrying both grief and resilience: teaching forgotten histories while tending to ancestral trauma. This process unearths imposter syndrome, shame in being witnessed, and mistrust of one’s own body and story.

Eroticism — long demonized under colonial and patriarchal rule — is reclaimed here as a sacred force of resistance. By placing herself nude within a church, Alexa confronts one of the most powerful symbols of imposed morality upon her people, transforming it into a site of empowerment. The body becomes declaration: transcending fear of judgment, embodying erotic pleasure, and aligning with the earth’s sensual intelligence — energies historically perceived as threats to colonial control.

Eroticism becomes a form of spiritual liberation, unlocking higher states of consciousness and creative capacity — a power deeply feared and suppressed by colonial patriarchy. The imagery is intentionally confronting, inviting the viewer to reexamine their own perceptions of feminized beings and the centuries of their exploitation.

This film extends Alexa’s larger body of work, Nepantla — a series exploring the in-between states of identity, lineage, and belonging through photography, ritual, and tarot. Within this continuum, the video stands as both testimony and invocation: a raw offering of truth, a reclamation of the erotic as power, and an act of defiance against the erasure of Indigenous and feminine presence.

NEPANTLA