Conjuring Collective Memory

Over the past couple years, you were often in different places across the world—Johannesburg, Richmond, Helsinki. Like you, the work we’re showing at MoMA has traveled the globe. It was first presented in Venice, then Milan, Paris, and now New York. Each time the work has been shown differently. What was important to you about showing this piece for the first time on US soil, and how has this presentation changed? What did you want to highlight here?

It’s the historical relationship of this land to the work. It became important for me to make visible the history of the transatlantic slave trade. And also the displacement of Indigenous people, and all the histories in between as well. The word that comes to mind is “offering”...what the offering of that is to the world. But I’m resisting using that word because it feels so loaded. How can somebody’s pain offer so much to the world? What are the aftereffects, the afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade? There’s so many threads and tentacles. And also I’ve been trying to map what was happening in my ancestral lineage when that was happening in the Americas: which generation, which grandfather, which grandmother was alive then? What were the circumstances in South Africa, Southern Africa, or the African continent?

I haven’t heard you talk about your ancestral lineage in relation to the work before. What was it that you found when you were talking to family members or looking into that genealogy? What did that bring up for you?

It was less speaking to family members, but researching what has been written. I was also looking at documentation of conversations between Indigenous people and Europeans, recorded by missionaries or colonial agents. What would my great grandfather have been aware of? What would have been the things that influenced his life and trickled down to me? His education. His worldview. And also the colonials at that time as well. What did it mean that slavery was abolished in the Americas while another kind of slavery was happening on the African continent and in other parts of the world? What do those places mirror about each other?

The sound in the installation is so resonant. Particularly when you’re in the circle and immersed in it and it’s moving all around you. I know you come from a musical family. How do you think about sound in relation to your work?

Sound conveys so much that is perhaps unsaid or in the background. It connects with subconscious processes. All those places are singing in chorus. Different points are being attended to. It was important also to consider the vibrations and the frequencies as well. So there are different tones that come into the work. When I was recording the song in Jamaica in the studio, we tried to lay some instruments over a voice to make a song.

I want to go back to the timelines you spoke about earlier. Because you’re working with natural materials like rock, soil, and water, and thinking about the memories that still live in them and are transmitted through them. And so there’s this sense of time that feels more than human. It’s not just ancestral, it’s also geological and incredibly expansive. Can you talk about your approach to rock, soil, water, mountains, and thinking beyond the human?

When you drew a distinction between the ancestral and the geological, then it occurred to me whether they’re the same thing, whether the geological is ancestral. I wondered whether we are made of the same materials as the water, or the mountains, or the trees. Whether they are grandparents, or mothers and fathers, who occupy a different way of articulating life and time and process. Perhaps these materials, minerals, and elements know something about us that we can’t always see about ourselves. Or they remember differently. The memories that we can’t seem to keep, they keep. For the sake of our day-to-day lives, it’s apparently not useful to remember how many almonds one has eaten in one’s lifetime. But a tree might remember the rainfall of a particular season. Or when Halley’s Comet came.