nexus
This project is a multi-lingual, multi medium series exploring in great length, the re-memory of a time that once came, is yet to come and is present in its evidence. It consists of mostly archival material, and footage namely Congolese, and mostly my own. It explores family, loss, grief, joy, nostalgia, freedom, revival, and language. The unspoken language of those who know the weavings of the unspoken, untold, unbound and interconnected. It sits somewhere between remembering and forgetting. A re memory. A re memory of sorts.
All of the works in this collection are deeply personal somehow. Whether directly, indirectly, implicitly, or explicitly, at one point or the other, they have had a deep impact on my life, our lives. From found archival photographs of my great grandparents who were alive to witness and be held captive during the great Congo plunder, working on the rubber fields, plantations, factories in unbearable conditions, to the mining of the Uranium that was used to create the first atomic bomb located not too far from some of these places. To the zoning off of Congolese peoples who were divided into categories, none of which saw them as humans, capable of anything beyond being exploited. This series explores the dependency of memory. It sits somewhere between remembering and forgetting. A re memory of sorts. Oppressed folks most especially marginally oppressed Black folks have always had an incredible capacity to navigate these deep places in often very deep and unspoken ways.
I first came across the term re memory while exploring the works of Ja’Tovia M. Gary whose works were also inspired at the time greatly by Toni Morrisons exploration of the term which greatly influenced her book Beloved. She explains Re memory as ‘history versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. That struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting,’ that has also become the device of the narrative that makes this work.
I also have to acknowledge Tina. M Campt, Fred Morton, Saidiya Hartman, Arthur Jafa, Amy Sall, my family, close friends, partner and all those whose thinking and works have influenced and shaped my own, in thinking with memory, the criticality of understanding the Black and African Gaze, the value in sitting with Images and understanding the African as a space of deep nuance and interrogation, as well as shifting how I see and expanding my capacity engage and be engaged, and in allowing me to understand what it means to sit with works, with words, with images and with all of it.
wani toaishara
(b. Bukavu, DRC. 1990)