Currents of Memory: The Sea, Ritual, and Rebirth in Film
Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 2pm EST via Zoom, free with registration. RSVP here
How do we experience the land and the sea as containers or agents of memory? How can inherited and personal rituals amplify our interconnectedness with the landscapes we inhabit?
In this film screening and conversation, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuba/USA) and Deborah Jack (St. Maarten/Netherlands) discuss the similarities and differences between their multidisciplinary practices and creative engagement with cultural memory and personal histories. Through film and sound, these two artists consider the ongoing impacts of colonization, trans-cultural identities, and contemporary diasporic experiences across the Caribbean region. Sharing artworks including Campos-Pons’ collection of photography, film, and performances and Jack’s film The Water Between Us Remembers…so We Carry This History On Our Skin…long For A Sea-bath And Hope The Salt Will Heal What Ails Us, they immerse viewers in the specificities of their nations’ histories as they breathe power into inherited traditions and new mythologies that center island and oceanic landscapes as spaces of healing and rebirth.
Lingering: reflections, questions, and scores for continued engagement
in collaboration with Ayaka Fujii
What is your relationship to the sea?
Where do you feel the sea in your body?
Where does your body find restoration?
Where are your edges?
Where do your borders become mutable?
Where is your reservoir?
Where do the shorelines within you meet?
Where is your geography calling you?
Contemplations for being ‘here’:
soften your edges.
feel,
your feet making contact with the ground
the small dance happening in stillness and inner movement
your body as a constellation of waves, arriving and departing
the borderlessness between your skin and space
breathe,
to feel a letting and listening
to feel a deep connectedness
“we are the same thing”*
find,
a reservoir in the soft places
in the continuum of time,
behind you, here, and before you
move,
in a duet with the waters of your body
the waters of the air
of the soil
of the rivers and seas
“the saliva / the amniotic waters /
that flow / in / under / ground / streams” **
waters that pull and push at your softened edges
that erode the borders of time to shape a world continually remade
by the accumulation of histories and memory’s fluidity
currents that intertwine life and death and life again
to draw up the threads of (re)memory
that tangle in the spaces between
to “press your ear to the wind” **
to be “many in one” *
like how a wave moves through time.
* “We are the same thing. Saltwater, sweetwater, freshwater. This is not art. This is life – unfair, unfinished, disrupting, brutal, gorgeous, full of promise. Find imbalance. Being many in one. Finding balance, finding justice, find [that] inside us, we are the same thing. A tornado, a hurricane, a small fountain. Embodiment of the history of power, of inclusion, exclusion. We are the same thing.” (Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons)
** Foremothers (2002) by Deborah Jack.
Additional Resources
Read The Sea Is History by Derek Walcott – Poems | Academy of American Poets
Read Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”
Read “The Sea and the Breathing” by Astrida Neimanis
Listen to “The Nature of All Our Forms”: María Magdalena Campos-Pons on Performance Art
See Magda’s recent and ongoing project When We Gather, which marked the election of the first woman to the Vice Presidential office
Stay tuned for more talks and collaborations from Magda’s initiative Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice at Vanderbilt University
Read about Deborah’s work in her own works in ForgottenLands Vol. 3
See Deborah’s work in the online exhibition Seascape Poetics, Curated by Bettina Pérez Martínez
Read the recent BOMB Magazine article on Deborah’s work Mare Incognitum / Unknown Sea: Deborah Jack Interviewed
Read About Evidence: A Conversation between Deborah Jack & Patricia Ortega-Miranda – Now Be Here
Stay tuned for more news about Deborah Jack’s solo exhibition at Pen + Brush Gallery in September 2021
Stay Up-to-Date with the Artists’ Upcoming Works and Events
Deborah Jack (@debjack0) • Instagram
María Magdalena Campos-Pons — Gallery Wendi Norris
About the Artists
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuba/Nashville, TN, USA) combines and crosses diverse artistic practices, including photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance. Her work addresses issues of history, memory, gender, and religion; it investigates how each one of these themes informs identity formation.
Born in 1959 in La Vega, a town in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, Campos-Pons is a descendant of Nigerians who had been brought to the island as slaves in the 19th century. She grew up learning firsthand about the legacy of slavery along with the beliefs of Santeria, a Yoruba-derived religion. Directly informed by the traditions, rituals, and practices of her ancestors, her work is deeply autobiographical. Often using herself and her Afro-Cuban relatives as subjects, she creates historical narratives that illuminate the spirit of people and places, past and present, and renders universal relevance from personal history and persona. Her imagery and performances recall dark narratives of the Middle Passage and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. They honor the labor of black bodies on indigo and sugar plantations, renew Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and celebrate revolutionary uprisings in the Americas. As she writes, “I…collect and tell stories of forgotten people in order to foster a dialogue to better understand and propose a poetic, compassionate reading of our time.”
Campos-Pons has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other distinguished institutions. She has participated in the Venice Biennale (twice), the Dakar Biennale, the Johannesburg Biennial, Documenta 14, the Guangzhou Triennial, three editions of the Havana Biennial, and the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and Prospect.4 Triennial. She has presented over 30 solo performances commissioned by institutions including the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Deborah Jack (St. Maarten), is a multi-media artist who deploys photography and video/sound installation as strategies for mining the intersections of nature, history, memory, and her global present. Her work articulates historical and cultural injury in a way that avoids images of suffering and victim-hood often used as visual hot buttons. She is intrigued by the concept of the “re-memory” (renewed or remembered memory): memory as a trigger and a means for exploring the dismembering of the histories, cultures, traditions, families, and personal memories of her community/self. Her overall art practice, which deals with cultural memory and narrative, has taken a more direct turn towards climate change, coastal erosion, and the rise of Atlantic hurricanes. In film, sound, photography, and language, she examines how climate change, environmental activism, and disaster economics have transformed themselves into what seems like colonialism in a new skin.
Deborah Jack’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. Her work is currently featured in the virtual exhibition Seascape Poetics, and was the subject of a recent interview with Jessica Janay in BOMB Magazine. Previous group exhibitions include The Other Side of Now at the Perez Art Museum of Miami in 2019/2020 and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, which traveled to the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, the Frost Museum at FIU, Portland Museum in Maine, and The Delaware Art Museum. Her work has also been exhibited at TENT Rotterdam, SITE Santa Fe , Brooklyn Museum, and Jersey City Museum. She has published two poetry collections, The Rainy Season and skin. Deborah Jack is an Associate Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.
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