The Medium is the Method
My primary practices involve sound and video making. My approach is through method of spiritual possession, hauntology, and dreamwork. Video and sound here can act as a “medium”, a way of invoking and channeling spirit. I am inspired by the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in particular, which unfold like dreams in a non-sequential, non-linear, meandering flow. In the film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, fables are interspersed between dreamlike realities in a felt, anachronistic way. It reminds me of the way that a dream will pull you in any direction at (its) will based on what is buried in the unconscious, propelled by one’s desires and fears. The screen functions here as a ghostly apparatus, a conduit that temporarily frames the passage of the phantasmic subject, whether they are dead, alive, or somewhere in between.
Making Kin
“All slaves want to be free — to be free is very sweet…I have been a slave myself — I know what slaves feel — I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me.” — Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative (1831)
A taste. A feel. A tell. Mary Prince’s final paragraph contains insights without the predominance of sight. Her narrative of her enslavement in British colonized Bermuda, Antigua, and Turk’s Island is a reckoning of her suffering within a network of relation of other sufferers. Prince repeatedly places the terrifying details of her own experience in relation to her observations of the predicaments of the other enslaved. She listens. A sense of empathy pervades. Her empathic storytelling can be understood as a way of making kin through a sense of shared pain.
Making kin (a term I am borrowing from Donna Haraway) was a necessary practice of African born and African descended slaves during and after their fateful voyage through the Atlantic. New associations formed in the face of intentional cleaving of cultural ties between cultural groups by Europeans. Since previous traditions of making kin became increasingly untenable, new forms of autopoiesis and sympoeisis became necessary. The enslaved formed new relations, alliances, romances, enemies. They carried on, innovated, and expanded the fragments of their cultural practices.
An understanding of shared pain that is felt and not always seen is a part of the way Prince makes kinship with other slaves. Empathy becomes the condition of possibility for kinship in her writing. It is this kind of empathic forging of relations that I invoke as a method in my visual praxis. In any kind of representation of another I am attempting to forge a kinship through sharing an energetic connection and empathic awareness of what they might be experiencing.
“In the Caribbean whether it be African or Amerindian, the recognition of an ancestral relationship with the folk or aboriginal culture involves the artist and participant in a journey into the past and hinterland which is at the same time a movement of possession into present and future. Through this movement of possession we become ourselves, truly our own creators, discovering word for object, image for the word.” — Kamau Brathwaite, “Timehri” (1970)
In Kamau Brathwaite’s essay “Timehri”, Brathwaite analyzes the artistic praxis of Aubrey Williams, a Guyanese artist who works with forms of rock painting created by the Warrau, a people indigenous to Guyana. Timehri are described as “rock signs, paintings, petroglyphs; glimpses of a language, glitters of a world, scattered utterals of a remote Gestalt; but still there, near, potentially communicative” (40). Brathwaite suggests that it is the spirit of Williams’ indigenous ancestors that communicate through Williams’ expressionistic brush strokes. When speaking of his own practice Williams invokes a “primordial” sense of the Pre-Colombian Caribbean that is essential to a making of identity there.
My visual research praxis is an act of reading the present as a palimpsestic accumulation of past traces. It is a work of dreaming the past and present together as one. The method is both conscious and unconscious, informed by beings, figures, and ancestors. My method breaks with progressive historical understandings of a telos of past to present to argue that the present is always inflected by the past, and the past is a way of telling the present. As Faulker famously wrote, “the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past”. Like in Caribbean carnival pleasure, pain, stillness, and jouissance of present and past all fold into one another.
Trauma-Memory
Memory-Time
Today I lit three candles on my altar. One for my grandmother Alexandrina, one for my grandmother Francisca, and the last for my child self. I called on my ancestors to help me manage my anxiety and bring ease to my breathing. The candle I lit for a young Wendy (my dead name) was to help her heal from the pain of her childhood. If there is anything that shows us that the past is not past it is trauma. Trauma-memory time exists outside of teleological time. The felt wounds of the present signify an enduring reckoning with the past. Present and past are not quite same but they are fused together. Some of these wounds have not healed over generations. At the same time that I invoke my ancestors to help me heal I am doing the work of healing their persisting wounds. They possess me and/as I possess them.
It is this form of calling upon ancestors and working through spirit as a kind of possession that works through the sound and video making practice I seek to develop. I will work in various archives, unofficial and official, in order to find the stories that seek their telling. The method will include speaking to my elder family members from Panama about their memories and dreams. I want to trace routes of movement in the Caribbean through their memory. From my understanding my great grandparents are from Kingston, Jamaica. I am interested in understanding the way that capital functioned as a force that moved descendants of slaves between the Caribbean islands in search of places to gain a living wage. Mary Prince speaks of the ways she was contracted out to work in different sites in the Caribbean. I am interested in the kinds of movement brought about by coercion that push against that violence. The movements of people captured, but never fully, by the forces and desires beyond them. (Let us not forget that dancing as a movement practice has always been a vital part of Caribbean culture.)
“…to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them. No being-with the other, no socius without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us. And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.
If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights. It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. “ –Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
Nowhere is the human more radically different than in their relation with specters. A relation with ghosts is a call to an ethical form that challenges the boundaries of humanism and the human sense of teleological time. A sense of indebtedness to ghosts of ”the past” and to those ghosts to come disrupts the emotional investment in a notion of biological and physically embodied man. The notion of “being with” the other becomes more enigmatic than ever in the company of ghosts. It is staying with the enigma that becomes a site of radical creative possibility and the rewriting of political responsibility (here, the ability to respond ethically to the unseen). How might one be/come ethically bound to spirit? What is the sense of being in time that hauntology describes? These are questions that I am beginning to grapple with.
Sugar
Salt
Sweat
Sweet
These I am invoking as the guiding terms for my narrative project set in various sites within the Caribbean. I am greatly influenced by the narratives of palimpestic time such as the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison, a historical narrative that is also a ghost story where a scar in the shape of a tree is the enfleshed trace of trauma in the present. I’m thinking about the commodities of “sugar” and “salt” that were harvested in plantation economies of the Caribbean. That is to say I am thinking about taste, from acrid that haunts the savory and sweet, but also the sweetness of the unsavory. Many are familiar with the harvesting of sugarcane in the Caribbean but may not be as familiar with the salt pans of the Turks and Caicos islands. In Mary Prince’s narrative she describes the physical, psychological, and spiritual impact of standing in these saltwater pans from four in the morning to nine at night. I want the work to acknowledge how the labors of producing sugar and salt come to bare on the present. The sweat of slave bodies laboring are a part of the capitalist calculus that goes unmeasured. Sugar, salt, sweat, sweet are terms that I am using to signal the physical and spiritual labors of the past as they link continually to the present.
Dreamstories
I am only beginning to embark on a critical-emotional engagement with my dreams. The dream state is a place where one communes with spirit — this merging of one’s one and those of ancestral forces. Dreaming is a significant aspect of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films and installation work. Often we watch characters as they sleep or t Trauma-memory time exists outside of teleological time.he stories that are enacted in their dreams. Earlier this year Weerasethakul created an installation at IFFR in Rotterdam called Sleepcinemahotel, where participants were invited to enter into a space with comfortable bedding and soft surfaces. A 120-hour film is projected with the soothing sounds of ocean waves and a creaking ship. Weerasethakul’s intention is that the installation’s guests sleep while the images and sounds play along with and merge into their dreams.
In my practice I am interested in the knowledge that can come from considering dreams, the unconscious stories that have a role in producing realities. I am drawn to consider both the unconscious abstract dreams that people possess and which possess them, and also the pragmatic dreams of achieving a good life on Earth. Sleeping dreams are something we are responsible to without being conscious of: they may permeate into our activities without our awareness. I’m also thinking of dreamwork as a kind of labor practice that cannot be fully usurped by capital.
Kamau Brathwaite’s Dreamstories (1994) is a work I am looking to as a source for thinking about dreaming. This is itself can be understood as a translation work — translating dream into thought from the thoughts that are taken up in dreams. Moved by Brathwaite and Weerasethakul, I want to work to understand what it means to make sound and video work that are like and motivated by dreams.
