Marianne Costade Re-Documents Ancestral Hair Practises For The Representations Of Black Hair

Marianne Costade (@ooomarianne) is a visual artist, photographer, and independent archivist whose practice centers on the creation of living archives of Black hair practices. Working at the intersection of image-making, archival research, and cultural memory, she approaches hair as an embodied and relational archive shaped by care, ritual, and intergenerational transmission.

Her work is grounded in long-term research that combines family archives, oral histories, and contemporary fieldwork across the African diaspora. Through photography, installation, and embodied gestures, she re-documents ancestral hair practices as living systems of knowledge rather than fixed cultural artifacts.

By foregrounding the gestures of women and the intimate spaces of braiding, Marianne’s practice resists extractive or aestheticized representations of Black hair. For Marianne, re-documenting ancestral hair practices is a way of reclaiming narratives that were interrupted, overlooked, or misrepresented, and of honoring the women and hands that carried these traditions forward.

Swipe to see her re-creations.

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