This piece was created in 2022 in Montgomery, Alabama, the historic cradle of the Confederacy. At the time, the United States was experiencing a relentless series of mass shootings that felt senseless, constant, and inescapable.
While working with scrap metal in Montgomery, Afatasi found the flat silhouette of a gun. The object was unusual: a two-dimensional gun form already present in the scrap. She then found other fragments, including a hand that fit the gun with an unsettling precision. Spirals, chains, and small human figures also emerged from the salvaged material, shaping the language of the piece.
The sculpture reflects on America’s obsession with guns and the way mass shootings saturate public consciousness. Afatasi is interested not only in the violence itself, but in the media cycle that surrounds it: the repeated images, the constant reporting, and the way public attention can both expose the horror and fuel its repetition.
The chained figures represent people whose lives are permanently impacted by gun violence: families, witnesses, survivors, and communities. For Afatasi, gun violence is not a single event that ends when the shooting stops. It becomes part of a person’s life, affecting the body, memory, mental health, and future. In this work, the chain becomes a symbol of that permanent entanglement.
