During Hurricane Katrina, my power came back before my mother's did.
That shouldn't have been the outcome. I was a struggling artist living in a studio apartment with bedbugs and termites. My mother had a nicer condo, a better job, and was paying more in taxes than I was. By every measure we're taught to trust — income, effort, doing it right — her lights should have come on first.
They didn't. It took two days.
Mine came back almost immediately. Not because I'd earned it. Because my building happened to share a power grid with multimillion-dollar homes across the street. My mother's neighborhood, a few miles away, wasn't on that grid.
I remember thinking, at the time: is this a modern-day plantation system? Not the plantation of the past — its architecture. Quietly redrawn as zip codes and utility grids, still deciding whose comfort gets restored first, still tracing back to old money and old proximity, no matter who worked harder or paid more into the system.
That question never left me. Years later I found it again, in something quieter. My grandmother's porch, where the last check happened before church — hair fixed, dress smoothed, girdle cinched. Presentable enough to walk in. Instructions passed off as protection, said on the way out the door.
The pattern doesn't stay small. I found it recently in Diablo Canyon — California's last nuclear power plant, caught in a decision that isn't final. If it's decommissioned without a real plan, the state could lose 20% of its power by 2030. There's an extension on the books, until 2045, but nobody's promising it holds.
So I stopped asking the question in the abstract and started asking it the way I always do: when the power runs short, who goes dark first? I already knew the answer before I looked it up. San Bernardino County. East LA. The same communities that always wait the longest.
A grid. A girdle. A power plant. Different shapes. Same inherited system, quietly deciding who it protects first — and who has to pass inspection just to be let in.
Every project I make asks some version of the same question: when does what we inherit become who we are?
From girdles on porches to dimes in bodegas to nuclear power plants sitting on native land — we create narrative experiences about the moment inheritance becomes identity.
Sincerely, Meesh