Listen to the audio version of this essay on Soundcloud.(Listening time: 19 minutes 7 seconds)
‘I’ve lost my bearings now’[1]
Artist Alberta Whittle’s video and film works are all about repetition—in part, the repetition of water, an Alive entity constantly moving. ’You can never touch the same water twice’ (2017), ’What is a better life (exorcised in the middle)’ (2021), ’What sound does the black atlantic make’ (2019), ’Lagareh – The Last Born’ (2022), ’Between a Whisper and a cry’ (2019), ’HOLDING THE LINE’ (2020), ’Business as usual: hostile environment: a REMIX’ (2021): they all tell a lyrical story of water. However, ‘Lagareh’ tells the story most vividly.
The past is conjured to our contemporary moment as the Scottish-Barbadian artist’s film ‘Lagareh’ traverses many settings, including Oswald’s Temple and Bunce Island, an island in the Sierra Leone River. Bunce was a holding cell, a grave for the unnamed. A ship owned by the Scottish merchant Richard Oswald underwent a huge operation on Bunce, in which 352 enslaved people were loaded onto the ship headed for South Carolina in 1773. [2] Under current ownership by the West of Scotland Agricultural College, the Auchincruive Estate, Oswald’s Temple (Tea House) was sold by James Murray of Broughton to the slave trader, Oswald in 1764. The estate remained in the Oswald family until 1925. The Historic Environment Scotland website refers to Oswald as an ‘entrepreneur and merchant’[3] instead of a slave trader. How revealing. The whitewashing arguably reflects the reluctance of Scottish institutions to come to terms with the full extent of its role in the transatlantic slave trade. I could further unpack what may seem immediately present–themes of colonialism and slavery–in the context of Whittle’s work; however, I would like to offer you something more integral first.
Act 1
26:05
♪ ALARM BEAT BLARES, WIND RAVAGES ♪
Something feels familiar. The synth in the soundtrack furiously pulsates. We can hear the unnerving clink of metal machetes on repeat. The rhythm is mournful. The sky is angry as the trees blow, and the long red cloth battles through the hurricane wind. A Black woman with copper-brown and black braids holding the cloth looks directly at us. Her gaze pierces through me. The camera’s lens wildly shakes. Before I can even blink, the screen flashes into a burning red inverted image and then reverts, revealing a slight smirk on her face. The smirk fades quickly into a different fleeting camera shot of ropes clutching a statue. Momentarily after, four Black women in all red appear, smacking their machetes on the palm of their hands in unison. They all stand firm with their eye on their target, us. Yet, I feel the ground is unstable and crumbling beneath my feet. Waves crash. Everything is spinning and spiralling.
♪ THUNDER RUMBLES REVOLT ♪
♪ FIRE BLAZES, PLANTATION BURN ♪
The women press against a wall of wind as they move within a thick layer of grass. Short flickering moments of their unsettled glances repeat twice. The four women return, still standing in the same position, unshaken. The camera is stable as the shot lingers for longer this time, and the sound of chaos slowly dissipates. Now, the ground begins to return to me. Whittle’s voice soothes me as she tells us to ‘Invest in Love’, and then a photograph of a gentle soul emerges. The text beneath it reads:
Sheku Bayoh
30th September 1983 – 3rd May 2015
It is now Saturday. ‘A wave-like mechanical rattle echoes’. The phrase ‘Articulating bodily memories of resistance and love (Rest in Power)’ is on the screen in yellow italics. The screen fades into black, and a close-up shot of wheat crops fades in. It is quiet for a moment. The crops brush through the fingers of a young Black girl dressed in something red with white sleeves. Wooden flutes hum tenderly, and then the scene cuts to a woman with a yellow serpent.
Alberta voices her poem ‘Looking the Snare in The Eye’:
We are falling now,
Falling through time,
dancing,
jack-knifing
The young girl shakes a blue hourglass sideways while the narrator, Alberta, recites the poem. As Alberta continues, a Black female figure with bleached hair holds two machetes, dancing and moving as though they are an extension of her arms. The person looks directly into the camera, their blades locked in a crisscross position. The scene moves along, and the music becomes gloomy, as we hear a rattling sound intensifying. After sinking into the depths of the filmic elegy of ‘Lagareh’, what jerked me fully back to my body was the 10 seconds leading to 26:05. I began to witness myself, body scanning once Alberta poetically utters:
You turn back and answer me in gestures,
In words I cannot remember.
I’ve lost my bearings now.
Alberta Whittle, ‘Lagareh – The Last Born’, 2022, film still at 26:05, single channel video, 42 minutes 39 seconds. © Alberta Whittle. Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute.
That last sentence is the remark at the time of 26:05, where I became fully aware that what I was experiencing during the film scenes was disorientation–a sense of not being able to recognise where you are or where you should go within the filmic narrative, followed by a ‘feeling of being confused or not being able to think clearly’ [4]. Feminist philosopher Ami Harbin in her 2016 book, ‘Disorientation and Moral Life’, has suggested that ‘[t]o become disoriented is, roughly, to lose one’s bearings in relation to others, environments, and life projects. Experiences of disorientation prompt sustained uncertainty[5]. The act of disorientation declared through verbal and written language is also performed in the use of the ‘I’ in ‘I’ve lost my bearings now.’ The screenwriter, also Whittle, explicitly etches disorientation into the film, which brings me to the central question I would like to ask you: What socio-political stakes for viewers unfold in ‘Lagareh’ through the film’s disorientation? For me, it’s clear that a stake is the ‘I’. Who am I, who are you, in relation to the film’s ‘I’? Whittle playfully orchestrates a scenario where we do not know if the ‘I’ is singular or plural. The ‘I’ is used skilfully to negotiate moments of interplay between all the players across the film. In 2015, feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey said that she still refuses to use the first-person singular out of a ‘shudder’ at self-expressiveness but also out of the ‘ideology of feminism, which emphasises the ‘we’ and the ‘us’’[6] over the ‘I’. Except it is precisely the singular ‘I’ that encompasses the ‘we’. Both pronouns converge in Whittle’s film and the intersectional feminism[7] that the work evokes. Intersectional feminism recognises how different forms of oppression intersect, and acknowledges that they look different for every individual. The ‘I’, therefore, cannot be disregarded.
On reflection of how powerful this one letter is, not only within Whittle’s piece, but also the work of others and animated debates around authorship and narration, we could put her film in an art historical conversation with culture fascinated with the relationship between art and language and, more broadly orality, be it curator Meg Onli’s exhibition “SPEECH/ACTS”; the uncanny use of the mouth and melodic noise in Whittle’s ’You can never touch the same water twice’ that brings me to think of the video installation ‘Easy to Remember’ (2001) by American artist Lorna Simpson or Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino’s video ’In-Out Antropofagia’ (1973–94).
Alberta Whittle, ‘You can never touch the same water twice’, 2017, film still, single channel, colour, 5 minutes 46 seconds.
There is no doubt that the mouth is charged, and perhaps a source of filmic disorientation. But it is ‘Lagareh’’s polyphonic texture, in particular, that causes the distinction between the author, narrator, and performer’s voice to dissipate. Lines are blurred and then amorphously remoulded—this is the artistry of disorientation. The discombobulation, accumulating at the work’s technical midpoint, brings our attention to fluctuating states of stability and instability, what is lost and then returned. Even if potentially unintended by the artist, disorientation as an aesthetic and methodology is key to Whittle’s filmmaking.
Act 2
Kumba’s Hands and the Texture of Disorientation
‘Hands…emerge as crucial sites in stories of disorientation…Hands hold things. They touch things. They let things go’[8], as British-Australian scholar Sara Ahmed expresses. Hands also emerge as crucial sites in artworks, and as Ahmed implies, they are important actors in stories of disorientation. Between 27:11 and 34:19 in ‘Lagareh’, performer Kumba Kuyateh sings a praise song for Sheku Bayoh–we are witnessing the elegiac hands of a Griot, a West African praise singer. The Griot is considered a leader and advisor due to their role in preserving oral tradition. The italicised yellow text at the beginning of the scene says that Kumba was performing a praise song ‘to calibrate the hands of justice and coax balance into the scales’. We see the hard wooden edges of the courtroom furniture. If we look closely enough, we can make out the scratches from the physical contact of something sharp, maybe the grooves of a watch or a pair of handcuffs.
The scene goes silent.
BANG! BANG!
Softly lit, Kumba’s palm bangs twice on the edge of the bench. Her arm is the only body part framed. She repeats this action across the room as the camera follows her. When we see her clearly, she opens the palms of her hands, and her arms rise in prayer. Kumba’s open offering is the visual depiction of Barbadian scholar, Kamau Edward Brathwaite’s perspective on oral tradition, which ‘demands not only the griot but the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds that the maker makes are responded to by the audience and are returned’[9] to her. Kumba’s hand at many points is the only thing in focus. Her open palm points towards us–commanding our attention with vulnerability and softness, vigour and ferocity.
Alberta Whittle, ‘Lagareh – The Last Born’, 2022, film still, single channel video, 42 minutes 39 seconds. Photographer Matthew Arthur Williams, © Alberta Whittle. Courtesy of the artist, Scotland+Venice, and Forma.
With a sense of authority, our gaze is held and then released. The close-up and then framing of the hand is a deliberate attempt for Whittle to orientate our gaze, getting us to become witnesses instead of lookers. Across the film, and more widely her film portfolio, we slalom through an uneven pattern of loss, love, resistance, and then loss again. Within a theory of disorientation in the scope of art, hands are critical to how subjects reorientate themselves with the ground, objects, and other subjects: Hands are a conduit of, violence (hands yield weapons, or hands become a weapon), memory (the recalling of memory through holding objects), loss (loosing or letting things go; grieving), and love (the embrace of hands). For example, Kumba’s hands deliver a sharp blow and then soften. She responds viscerally to the infrastructure in which injustice is enacted, the court, and then pleads to the room. Hands can allow us to feel through the world and flesh out our experiences. When we feel disconnected, touch can enable us to return to our bodies and leave us more dislocated.
Kumba’s performance and Whittle’s narration enables the film to be in conversation with a long history of artworks that zoom in on the haptic as an experience that both leans into and potentially exceeds the conventions of touch. Interestingly, the etymological root of haptic is the Greek word for haptein, which means to take hold of an object, fasten onto it, or touch it.[10] However, in stories like ‘Lagareh’, they also unhand–let things go. And as Ahmed reminds us, to tell a story of touch is also to tell a story of disorientation. However, although Kumba unhands, other hands tighten in Act 1.
Bodily memories and love return to the body of the protagonists, the narrator, and contemporary Black womxn despite the tight grasp of the metaphorical noose, as implied by the title of Whittle’s poem ‘Looking the Snare in The Eye’. A snare is a trap–a contrivance often consisting of a noose for entangling birds or mammals. However, within ‘Lagareh’, the noose is the violent chokehold of coloniality, the ‘afterlife of slavery’[11], which manages to hold on through what writer and academic Saidiya Hartman describes as the condition of ‘premature death’[12]. Whittle’s repetitive storytelling of rebellion calls for us to continue saying the name of Sheku Bayoh, who died in 2015 at only 31 years old after being restrained by police in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. In modern policing the hands have been systemically proven deadly in incidences of excessive force. As an intentional implication, the work puts into proximity the idea of the noose as an offensive weapon with Scotland’s historical connections to the transatlantic slave trade. Within Whittle’s film, Black womxn protagonists stand on Scottish ground tightly holding blades in their hands, looking the snare in the eye through an act of insurgence–clenching blades feel fitting here. Resistance claims the right to revolt through the hands when the hands, in countless instances, are the chosen weapon of violence.
Alberta Whittle, ‘Lagareh – The Last Born, 2022′, film still, single channel video, 42 minutes 39 seconds. Photographer Jaryd Niles-Morris, © Alberta Whittle. Courtesy of the artist, Scotland+Venice, and Forma, https://scotlandandvenice.com/news/the-journey-to-venice-begins/.
[1] The title refers to a phrase in Alberta Whittle’s ‘Lagareh – The Last Born’ (2022).
[2] Coleman, ‘Currency’, in Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher: Natural History, Slavery, and Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Deirdre Coleman (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 145, https://doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781786940537.003.0006. Voyage identification number 78105, Slave Trade Database.
[3] Historic Environment Scotland, ‘Auchincruive Estate, Oswald’s Temple (Tea House) (LB996)’, accessed 26 March 2024, https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB996. The Historic Environment Scotland website refers to Oswald as an ‘entrepreneur and merchant’ instead of a slave trader.
[4] Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, s.v. ‘disorientation’, accessed 20 August 2023, https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/disorientation?q=disorientation.
[5] Ami Harbin, ‘Preface: Life beyond What One Has Concepts For’, in Disorientation and Moral Life (Oxford University Press, 2016), xi, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190277390.002.0007.
[6] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure at 40: Laura Mulvey in Discussion (Extract) | BFI’, YouTube video recording of a panel discussion, 3:57 – 4:18. 29 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWAJdj3cPvA.
[7] Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ (not the idea) in critical race theory and developed the theory of intersectional feminism. See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics [1989]’, in Routledge EBooks, 2018, 57–80, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429500480-5. These ideologies are attributed to third wave and fourth-wave feminism.
[8]Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006), 165, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388074.
[9]Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984), 18–19.
[10]Collins Online English Dictionary, s.v. ‘haptic’, accessed 5 October 2023, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/haptic.
[11]Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).
[12]Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6.
Jade Foster is a British curator, artist and art historian of Afro-Caribbean heritage based in Nottingham and from Sandwell in the West Midlands. They are a DASH Curator, Public Programme Curator at Primary, and a trustee of Nottingham Contemporary.
At DASH, alongside the Artistic Director / CEO, they curate their system change work, The DASH Library, and Future Curators Programme (FCP) – a consortium and residency programme for Disabled curators within seven visual arts institutions across England (MIMA, MAC Birmingham, Wysing Arts Centre, John Hansard Gallery, Arts Catalyst, Disability Arts Online, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange). At Primary, they lead the development of exhibitions and digital commissions, focusing on brokering international collaborations – notably curating Imagining Otherwise featuring artists Ashley Holmes, Turner Prize 2024 nominee Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid.
Jade is also a member of the Black Curators Collective, AWITA, and the British Art Network (BAN).
