From The Deep: An Underwater Kingdom For Enslaved People Who Died In The Atlantic
“Yes, I think we did it,” Ayana W. Jackson, sitting in a round chair in a black coat, says with quiet satisfaction into the phone to the sound engineer.
An artist puts the finishing touches on an immersive video of Jackson himself floating among body paint and otherworldly costumes, corals, fish and boats. Your deep dive is accompanied by an ethereal song that can be whale calls, horns and sirens.
It is now the centerpiece of the exhibition "From the Deep: Following Drexia" at the Smithsonian African Art Museum in Washington DC.
The show is inspired by the fictional underwater kingdom of Drexia, inhabited by the children of pregnant women, considered "sick cargo" by Atlantic slavers, who were thrown or washed ashore during the Middle Passage.
Jackson, 45, whose life and work spans three continents, has long featured her body in her photographs, often referencing historical images of women of color. But the first video acquaintance with the installation "Journey through the depths of the sea" requires a new training.
He learned to dive with a GoPro camera in Senegal, Angola and Ghana. “Then I went to Trinidad and Tobago to get some new costumes made, and that’s when I got in the water and started trying to take underwater shots,” Jackson recalls.
“Then I realized that I don’t like making films. I was very close to the surface and tried to dive, and then I ran into my diving instructor: you are crazy. You can kill yourself. I am ready to do this project, but at least you are alive and well. We do not film until you are at the stage of salvation, so that you understand that you are helping not only yourself in trouble, but also yourself. Diver and operator.
Restricted by travel restrictions due to the epidemic, Jackson stayed in Tobago for 10 months and was certified as a master diver. He then traveled to South Africa to shoot underwater scenes with big budget cameraman Iran Tahor, divers and three cameras. He fell 90 feet without oxygen.
“I can hold my breath for two minutes, which is not surprising for a librarian: this is the baseline for a librarian. But in reality it rarely takes more than 30 seconds during filming because of the resistance and movement of the suit and so on. I can basically move for 20-30 seconds before I need air.
The music, accompanied by South African vocals by Nosisi Ngakane, is an homage to the early 1990s Detroit techno duo James Stinson and Gerald Donald, who was described by cultural critic Greg Tate as the "revisionist" Drekshia. Think of the Middle Passage as the Kingdom. Options, not death.
Drexia gives us the answer to the fate of pregnant women thrown from slave ships to drown or die in a final act of free will. According to legend, their children emerged from their mothers' wombs without breathing and founded an underwater civilization that proudly separated from the industrial world.
Abdul Kadim Haq and Dai Sato's graphic novel The Book of Drexia attracted the attention of many artists; Rivers Solomon's novel The Deep; Actor, singer and rapper David Diggs and his hip-hop group Clip Deep supported a Drexian uprising against oil seekers firing air cannons into the ocean.
Jackson says: “I have always felt that origin stories are very important. As a black American who attends a catholic school and is one of the few whites in the school when it comes to her educational history, where are you from, Lauren is from Germany, Giselle is from Greece, then I speak from Africa. .
“I remember being a bit confused by the description of Africa – It’s the 1980s, so it’s about death, catastrophe, destruction, tyranny, famine. And then National Geographic had a lot of almost primitive images of the black body, the African body.
He continued: “I had moments of breakdown and then I started thinking about pre-Slavic, pre-colonial times, and I went down the timeline to realize that my ancestors weren’t supposed to start with slavery. . I am actively thinking about it.
"Drexia existed before Afrofuturism became a word, but it was a philosophical way of making sense of speculative fiction and stories of other origins."
He cites the example of the avant-garde composer San Ran, who invented the myth that the Negroes are descended from the ancient Egyptians, who in turn are descended from Saturn. "There is something very important for our psychology of African race or people living in black bodies, to rethink our respect for our culture, our physical and mental health."
Jackson began the project by studying how the Drexians dressed, searching the museum archives for fabrics and clothing patterns that could recall 16th-century Africa and the enslaved peoples of England, France, Holland and Portugal. He traveled to Senegal, Ghana and Angola to collaborate with designers Rama Dayau, Olabandji "Chedar" Arovoshola and Mwambi Wasaki, designing and photographing the clothes now on display in Washington.
Through exhibition photography, video, animation, installation, sound and smell of the Massacre of the Saints, it includes nine characters copied from images of African gods. The porches encourage visitors to look inside and discover specific works one by one. The niches display the books that inspired Jackson.
The installation, which uses motion capture and CGI audio, suggests the arrival of the Drexians and includes a nude pregnant woman. The mannequin is not dressed by Drexia, but according to a legend passed down by Jackson's aunt in Ghana, a transparent dress made from African banknotes.
He explained, “When I told my aunt who lives in Ghana about the project, she said she heard that some people think that fishermen don't fish when they go out to sea. They trade with banks and merchants across the ocean. He says he doesn't know if he believes or not, but there are people who do.
“I went out to sea to undress the characters and asked the fisherman if he had ever seen this and he said they were definitely on boats where people thought they saw these merchants. He said he had never seen them in person, but some of them had ghost eyes. He said seriously, "I don't say no, I don't have eyes."
Jackson was born in Livingston, New Jersey but lives in Johannesburg and also spends time in Paris. This gave him some distance from the American era of Donald Trump and the racial profiling of African American George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.
“The advantage of this is that I have to get some kind of injury every day. I never realized how far I could run. This does not mean that there are no racial problems in South Africa or in Africa in general, but this is a different story and not close to my descendants. The feeling of distance is different.
“Of course, I think we have come a long way, but recently we have returned to a very ugly past, and it is painful to admit and express, but at the same time, there are definitely steps forward. There are things that you think don't stop us from communicating with each other, but some of them still exist.
The National Museum of African Art's collection of over 13,000 works of art spans 1,000 years of African history. From the Deep: At Drexia's Wake, curated by Karen Milburn, will run until April next year. Jackson hopes visitors will have an experience “From disaster to opportunity, from injury to relief, find an opportunity to place yourself in between. Be moved, but remember where the story came from, not healing and inspiration.