Alberta Whittle is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. In her film A Black footprint is a beautiful thing 2021, Whittle references shipworms, which led to two of Christopher Columbus’s vessels being abandoned in Jamaica. Known as the termite of the ocean due to its insatiable and destructive hunger, Whittle describes the shipworm as a ‘collaborator and decolonial agent that has actively intervened and resisted, willingly or unwillingly, the advance of European imperialism by unleashing its hunger on the woodwork of the ships that enabled the colonialisation of the Caribbean’, where her family originates from. In a related series, Whittle transformed historic engravings which visualised for European audiences the arrival of Europeans in the ‘New World’ in 1497. The series title Secreting Myths alludes to the distorting mythology of such representations, as well as an organic intervention with a snail trail printed in gold ink.