UnVessel 2021
This project is an experimental site-based work that looks at the relationship between Blackness and the river. The work brings together aspects of geography, architecture, and a feminist practice of unsettling how we think and know racialized place.
By placing a camera obscura, a small black box that projects an image of the outside world onto the walls of its interior, on the river, I seek to change the way we passively observe and experience the River and the body's relationship to it. A guiding question for this project is, what do histories and cartographies that trace and locate Black mobility along a river that moves between the Gulf of Mexico and Minnesota reveal about the lives and struggles of Black populations contemporarily in and between these spaces? The River has been way to think about space, time, and mobility and allows me to also ask, how does proximity to the river, a source of power and destruction, intersect with economy and race to produce and reproduce anti-black landscapes?
The articulation of space, place and time have deep implications for how we understand the relations of power, particularly in making legible who place is being made and unmade for and what narratives are needed to support these processes.
“If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”
Geographer Doreen Massey
Place then could, of course, be considered a matter of scale and a matter of time but might we also consider it a matter of race. Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick writes “ ... a black sense of place can be understood as the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter.”Paradoxically the structuring logic of a Black sense of place could both deny Black bodies, histories, and epistemologies the rights of place while also binding them to place, the pinnacle example of which, at least for McKittrick, being the Plantation.
But what might we learn about place, power, and change if we looked not at seemingly static space, but an unapologetically mobile political space, like the River.
I worked with New Orleans photographer David Armentor and Houston based fabricator Patrick Renner to build a mobile camera obscura that can float. I have been doing research on the Mississippi River and questions of Blackness, particularly around histories of Black mobility, migration and surveillance. As an observation device, the camera obscura projects a flat representation of the world around us on to a given surface.
As a surveillance device it reduces the world that we might ordinarily see through our bodies own lenses, our eyes, to an upside down image, partially defamiliarized. I want to add the experiential layer of being on water to this surveillance chamber.
Although we may experience the river and lakes on a boat, or by taking a swim, the camera obscura makes the river a cinematic, and disorienting experience. It also connects to socio-political histories of the river in which free and unfree Black bodies being were moved through space, to various ports, St. Louis, New Orleans, Natchez, Vicksburg including the Port of St. Paul. The beauty of the landscape, observed through this cinema box, or surveillance chamber, is then given meaning not solely by me as the artist but also by the bodies that choose to temporarily occupy its interiors, to read the river as such.
The camera obscura would be a small box with seats on the inside for four people in which they could sit and face an image being projected on to the interior wall. These "tours" would last approximately 20-30 minutes.