These artworks are dedicated to ancestors who survived the journey across the Atlantic to author a new world, to those of us who are their descendants still striving and surviving in the wake of slavery and to those whose bones lay on the bottom of the Atlantic.

Unmapped

an Afronautic Journey

By Camille Turner

This exhibition presents media artworks resulting from an Afronautic research-creation methodology I developed to engage with absences and fissures in the histories of the Canadian settler state. My Afronautic methodology operates as a set of principles that bring together Afrofuturism, critical fabulation and Black radical imagination to provide an embodied approach to recovering silenced and disavowed knowledge. It centers Blackness by locating and amplifying Black voices. Time does not operate sequentially. It is nonlinear. This shift in understanding of time makes it possible to gain perspectives from the past and future. Silence is an important clue that offers information and direction. What has been silenced makes itself known through haunting. Following this feeling of being haunted, I allow what has been suppressed to emerge. Perhaps the most important Afronautic principle is imagination used as a tool for building worlds. I use imagination to simultaneously reach backwards and forwards in time to become a portal through which the artworks emerge. As I reach into the archives of enslavement I also use my imagination to conjure a liberated future. This understanding of an imminent future gives me hope that enables me to survive the violence of the archive, to unearth vital insights into the past and to forge new possibilities for the future. 

NAVE is a three-channel video consisting of three intertwined scenes: One, a church in Newfoundland overlooks the sea. Two, a time traveler wearing white and carrying a rock and wooden staff enters the nave of a church to perform a ritual pouring libations to honour ancestors who endured the Middle Passage. Three, an ancestor emerges from water offering song and dance reminding the African Diaspora of the strength and resilience of ancestors who crossed the water on slave ships. The soundtrack of Nave is dominated by the sound of the sea, the voice of the ancestor and drums fading, rising, and dispersing with the waves. 

SARAH is a documentary style video that explores the experience of a Black researcher feeling the weight of anti-Blackness in the present while trying to do the work of unsilencing anti-Blackness in the past. The story takes place in the researcher’s apartment where she sits at her computer researching the story of the Sarah, a slave ship constructed in Newfoundland while she is bombarded by present day media reports of Black people targeted by state violence. The story is narrated by an Afronaut from the future whose ancestors left earth in the twenty-first century when the planet had become unbearable for Black people. Now living in peace amongst the stars, their historians silenced the past to give them a fresh start. But silence is not seamless and the past haunts their dreams. The Afronaut travels back in time to 21st century earth to find out why their ancestors had left. Through watching  what the researcher recovers and what she is experiencing in the present, the Afronaut learns the truth. 

AFRONAUTIC RESEARCH LAB: NEWFOUNDLAND is a video/installation project that has two components. The first is a video of a time traveler from the future who arrives in the present with a rock she found on the shores of West Africa. The rock travelled to West Africa as ballast on a slave ship constructed in eighteenth century Newfoundland. She walks across Newfoundland’s barren shores, previously inhabited by a forest that extended to the water. The second component of this artwork is a collection of archival materials that provide evidence of the slave ships and the eighteenth-century colonial world in which they were constructed.