‘OUR’ BODIES ARE CLOCKS MADE OF WATER when do ‘We’ belong?

Working with images and material from National Geographic publications as a representational entry point, she symbolically works at dismantling the logic(s) that advocate for singularity, and that exclude the nuances of histories and identities that have come about through colonial and capitalist processes of control, categorising and displacement. Through her collage meditations, she aims to turn this logic on its head, and to re-code and erase the colonised/coloniser relationship embedded in the editorial decision making of this culturally dominant publication. Symbolically, it is a starting point for ‘freeing these identities’ from stasis, to reveal this fragmentation, and further convolute time and place out of the confines of the Western Anthropo-logic.

Interrogating the power of this printed universe, and in general, the role of paper as a marker of the Slave Trade - as currency, as the material that documented, narrativised and fixed ‘Our’ histories - she translates these printed images through processes of printmaking, zine making, video art and digital collage as a way to imagine how we might ‘re-publish’ and re-format ourselves in the future.

Suggesting a non-binary, fluid approach to questions relating to ‘where do we belong, how did we arrive and where are we going’, she employs the motif of water as carrier. As an aesthetic and spiritual inspiration, it has helped her to articulate her maternal family’s connection to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, through her ancestors who traveled from St Helena Island, surrounded by the Atlantic waters, to the Cape. This current ties island, main land bodies, and bodies of/in/from water together, creating an opening to explore involuntary entanglement and belonging/unbelonging.

Water also functions as a lens through which to understand the seas and the ocean as the “fundamental machine of capitalism” (Ayesha Hameed). It is a portal through which to understand the space/time at which colonised bodies were turned into currency, and thus, a starting point at which to view and engage with the disruption and fragmentation of our histories, dreams, memories and cells, that all still exist and are held in oceanic waters.

Kodwo Eshun describes the Transatlantic Slave Trade as site of “enforced mutation”, and asserts the alien, non-human, inhumane processes that were instrumental in the creation of modern capitalism. Myth-making and fiction are methods ‘We’ might employ to make sense of how these violences have informed ‘Us’, and through methods of collage and assembly, blk banaana attempts to articulate ‘Our’ right towards speculation and the obscure.

She hopes to affirm alternative modes of re-coding, remapping and reimagining the construction of ‘Our’ histories, and futures, from the point of understanding them as intrinsically fragmented trajectories.

References

Akomfrah, John. 1995. The last angel of history. New York: First Run/Icarus Films.
Harvard (18th ed.) AKOMFRAH, J. (1995).

Eshun, Kodwo. Drexciya as Spectre, Mendes, Margarida (Ed.), “Matter Fictions”,
Sternberg Press, 2017.

Hameed, Ayesha, Sea Changes and other Futurisms. Gunkel, Henriette and Ayesha Hameed, “Visual Cultures as Time Travel”, published by Goldsmiths University of London and Sternberg Press, 2021.

Hartman, Saidiya. Venus in Two Acts, Small Axe, Number 26 (Volume 12, Number 2), June 2008, pp. 1-14 (Article) Published by Duke University Press.

Phillips, Rasheedah, PLACING TIME, TIMING SPACE: DISMANTLING THE MASTER’S MAP AND CLOCK, The Funambulist (Published June 28, 2019).
 

© Earl Abrahams