“You can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.” These are the words of philosopher and literary critic Édouard Glissant. In 2009, Manthia Diawara, along with his camera, followed Glissant aboard the Queen Mary II on a transatlantic journey from Southampton, England to Brooklyn. New York. The boat, Glissant says, is “a sign of catching up the time lost; the time that you cannot let slip away.”
Sierra Leonian artist Julian Knox, known as Julianknxx, takes inspiration from Glissant’s work. He makes a staggering journey, this time to Europe, having embarked on a project to Antwerp, Barcelona, Hamburg, Lisbon, London, Marseille and Rotterdam. The artist travelled to port cities to create a series of films reflecting on choral song as a means of resistance. These pieces are now on display at Barbican Centre, London, in a poignant multimedia installation. Here, audiences can experience video displays that look at the power of local community through dance, music and testimony. Through and song and refrain, we are asked what it means to survive in personal and public disaster, as Julianknxx explores how culture and memory persist across large spaces of time and distance.
Julianknxx draws on the writings of American writer Paule Marshall book Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Lorna McDaniel’s Praisesongs in the Rememory of Flight (1988). The praisesong, a significant oral tradition and poetic form, captures the essence of animals, objects and humans. Julianknxx incorporates this into a “listening practice” that focuses on Black subjective experiences. He explains that the idea is rooted in his African heritage, where listening to tales from older people is a part of everyday life. “Back home, you listen to your elders—your uncle, your mum, your grandma—just saying stuff about the past or their day,” he says. What distinguishes this form of storytelling is that they are told “with a lot of aliveness.”
As a result, stories speak to a wide range of experiences. In Barcelona, Julianknxx examines the city’s port, its colonial explorations and the 2 million Spanish people who are of African descent today. He investigates the documented and undocumented demographic, heavily composed of street vendors or “manteros.” The resulting work functions as social practice: it examines mistreatment and manipulation by police and legal systems, in order to make certain populations “disappear.” Elsewhere, in the Netherlands, Julianknxx looks at arrival of Black populations from Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean following the Second World War. At the time, the white population of Bijlmer – a modernist city of concrete housing towers just outside of Amsterdam – did not welcome migrants with open arms. The living conditions of the area quickly deteriorated, no longer catering to a white community. This was later exacerbated by a plane accident that crashed into an apartment building in the district in 1992. The incident left 43 residents dead, although this number was likely higher due to the number of undocumented people living there. The event evokes contemporary examples of neglect, demonstrated in the 2017 Grenfell fire, where safety concerns were repeatedly ignored before the tragedy. As Debo Amon writes, “Yet now, after the devastation and reconstruction of both buildings and community, gentrification has brought disdain and negligence and onto those who survived once again.” Julianknxx responds with a video entitled, The Tree That Saw Everything. It engages with a tree in the Bijlmer district that “still stands despite the weight of all it knows.” Memorialisation becomes a way to strain against official narrative and structure. In an urban context, it becomes something lived and accessible – presented as the living things in our shared front yards.
Julianknxx uses a “listening practice” to create a comfortable and safe environment. Here, discussion is loose and free with other artists, expressed in any kind of way. “I say to them, ‘Whatever offering you want to give as part of my listening is what I’ll take’,’’ he says. In WePresent’s online version of the exhibition, Precious Adina explains: “the experiences in the city vary considerably. One artist asked if Julianknxx could film her sleeping because she was tired of talking. “So we went to her flat and sat down. She was wearing her robe. She talked to me for a couple of minutes and just went to bed.”
Elsewhere, Karel Kouelany, a male artist in Marseille, invited Julianknxx to his performance, where he and another dancer, Joël Assebako, performed nude atop a stage covered in salt. “They have their own music that they are dancing to, but for the audience, all you can hear is the salts,” he says, adding that visitors were encouraged to bring their own headphones though many chose to listen to the sound of their movement. The performance was a reinterpretation of a Congolese ritual that serves as a rite of passage for young men. In Berlin, another performer Natisa Ka asked Julianknxx to meet him inside an under-ground train station. When Julianknxx arrived, he was shirtless and equipped with a boombox to accompany his seemingly improvised dance exhibited among curious commuters. “The whole place was mesmerized by what he was doing. It was a dialogue—him using his body as a way to show what the city was like for him.””
These films encourage new perspectives on what it means to be caught between multiple places. This is rooted in Julianknxx ’s own diasporic experience, having grown up in Sierra Leone, before being forced to leave the country for The Gambia as a result of the civil war when he was 10, and then later the UK, when he was 15. “Blackness, to me, is this thing that I wear that means different things in different places and can be read in multiple ways,” he says. “I love exploring Blackness because when I was in Sierra Leone, I didn’t call myself a ‘Black person’ but when I came to England, I had to identify myself in that way.” The resulting installation is a “living archive with a trail” of stories. It challenges structures of power, as audiences are encouraged to look again, to explore histories that have been erased from contemporary knowledge.
Julianknxx: Chorus in Rememory of Flight | Until February 2024
Image:
Julianknxx, Production still of Chorus in Rememory of Flight, 2023 © Studioknxx
Julianknxx,Still of (Breathing by Numbers), 2022, Black Corporeal © Studioknxx
Julianknxx, Production still of Chorus in Rememory of Flight, 2023 © Studioknxx
Julianknxx, Production still of Chorus in Rememory of Flight, 2023 © Studioknxx