On Memories

Like weavers of time eroding  
We ride storms into an unknown each day 
Ever longing to give for 
Those that wrestled with demons and lost 

*** 

Whatever inherited memories are haunting our generation, they are “a contested space” where in stark contrast to the architecture of dreams, are created structures determining what we recall and how we recall it.  

The political and cultural - as unstable agents of memory; are constantly reassembled and disassembled to orient oneself to the tattered reproductions of revered moments and occurrences.  

But memory is both a fool and miser, a jester who conjures objects within a vacuum  
of meaning.  

And travelling like gossip, memory metabolises into an organic entity that is sensed and tasted, seen and heard in hallucinatory chambers of our minds. 

Objects we carry from one place to another, possessed with our souls and charged with our collective emotions and memories; like fragments of what is left behind, they anchor our lives’ memories and their disorienting transformations sparked by dislocations from familiar environments.  

And as mobility continues to shape our living conditions and environments, it also affects our relationships with objects we embed with worth determined by experiences and attachments. 

These objets can bear traces of decay, their eroded beauty generating a newer shifting resonance with memories fading; but still these objects are themselves weavers of times and we forever interact with it through memories continually born. 

In these objects and their surfaces, textures and hues, we find documented days  
and years of memories of those innumerable hands that grasped and used them. 

Into the abyss of dis-remembrance though memories erode and deteriorate, often  
these object outlive those who stored and devoted memories into them; and when  
decay is not resisted beauty looms, when the gravity of memory obeys time’s ravages there rises imperfect yet marvellous reflections that are not flaws by news ways of being. 

Memory mutates, and circulates within bodies, a body that is given being by other bodies; it’s always flirting with the sacred suspended between the living the dead. And yet can memory exists without words formulated to conjure their meanings? 

In my inexhaustible fascination with how memory takes a vantage point within a  
complex assortment of recollections, my video art weaves a veritable assembly of  
ideological commentary that are culturally layered yet rooted in locales of black  
experiences. 

And as places become locations, bodies become information and informants -  
memory becomes resource for exploitation; and I therefore use video art is the allegorical intervention for filling the prevailing blindspots of our socially collective memory. 

And art, like a promise, is the responsibility taken for that which doesn’t exist, and  
this promise is held to be transformed yet preserved like bonds and traces of commitments to be upheld. 

Through art we forge practices of mourning that sharpen our pain also render monuments to events experienced in transience; yet all beings recall and like promises that bind us to the unknown, so does memory. 

***