Transcript:

0:00 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic music ♪]

0:11 – [ Torkwase Dyson: ] In the slippery wetness of the water laying, against the pressure of movement, against the pressure of his own body. So, the physicality of that architecture, the ship architecture itself, in relationship to the breathless matter of this individual crawling through this hole. Thinking about, you know, in the work, I think about pressure, I think about distance, I think about pulling things tightly. And I can’t imagine what that may have been like. But for me, imaging, and imaging, as you talk about imaging in your book, in particular, sort of thinking about the round, thinking about geometry in that way, and thinking about how that shape allowed a kind of something that I can’t even fathom as a diver myself. I can’t even fathom that kind of moment. But also connecting that moment to Box Brown making the hole, right? And Harriet Jacobs is making the hole, and understanding that the wood, the touch, the grain, the materiality of the self emancipation, right? Is constant, right? And to think about what it means to have, make work in relationship to that materiality, the rope, the knot, the dragging, the pressing, while thinking about spatiality, right? So there was a moment where he’s in the hole, right? And then he’s out in this vast water, then he’s back in, right? What about time in that way, right? And these are things that I’m just trying to think about in, in terms of making objects that keep me in relationship to those consdering. Keep me into a relationship to considering what that time, and space, and objectness, right? So then the work becomes a way that I am, you know, I bind myself to these histories to get at and otherwise, right? To get at a sort of understanding of the critical moment of the now but then future, the kind of understanding of senses and sensoria around these histories that I think are paid so little attention to. So Black sensoria, the haptic and what, how we, you know, how we know? You know, how we know through touch and feeling.

2:40 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic continues ♪]

2:41 – [ Alice Walker: ] We’re walking around on the Earth that is actually literally full of ancestors, and we never pay any attention to this fact. I mean, most people don’t. It is as if all of the Indigenous knowledge, all of the Indigenous wisdom, all of the Indigenous everything, is just something that we completely discredit as if it never existed. And this is a deep impoverishment of us as modern people. That’s probably why we walk around looking like we are zombies. I know what it feels like to be supported by ancestors. I lean on them all the time. These are the people who have gotten me as far in life as I am, and that they’re very – they’re there.

4:30 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic continues ♪]

9:57 [♪ fades ♪]

Exhibition: Mapping Ancestries through Sound, Space and Time, Stina Baudin, 2024

Transcription by Dustyn Krasowski-Olmstead, 2024