Exhibited in Transmission Gallery, Glasgow 21 September– 26 October 2019
Exhibition text
I’m writing this coming back to my hotel from a seminar about “otherness” and how to discontinue the “us / them” narrative in contemporary theatre making. My hands are still trembling, my heart is racing and I’m trying to figure out how to articulate these physical feelings in words.
Trying to articulate these feelings have become a part of my creative practice. When there are no words for these experiences, I find the need to turn to something else. The words of others often help. More and more, poetry and stories seem to give me the relief I seek. These revelations of experience from others who have struggled find the words but have conjured them through visceral, sensorial, abstract, material and physical ways. The words of others that I can read and speak and write and sing and perform and feel in my body; performing the act of research.
I’m a sculptor by training and a performer by practice. In all senses, I ‘make’ as a practice of discovering and understanding. This exhibition is a process feeling my way to understanding my/our contemporary or present condition and thinking about the ways in which history is present in this. I am a black, British, Guyanese woman living in Scotland and this is a process of trying to figure out what that means through making connections and reading between things. A year ago I came across the research of a Scottish historian which elaborated on the historical relationship between Guyana and Scotland and I learnt about a number of Caribbean women who came to have a presence in Scotland in varying ways over 200 years ago. Taking these women as my starting point, I have been thinking about how speculating on their existence can offer understanding of my present one. When researching these women, again I find that the words are barely there. Names, dates and events appear in letters, on census’ in legal documents and travel records but between these words there are only empty spaces; a mumble of “the skeleton of a name” .
An insight from the philosopher Guyatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay The Politics of Translation has guided me in developing a process of speculation. Spivak refers to the process of translation as “the most intimate act of reading” , recognising it is not just words from which meaning is made, rhetoric is also present in the silence between and around the words. Therefore, “[t]he history of the language, the history of the authors moment, the history of the language-in-and-as-translation must figure in the weaving as well.” Spivak goes on to describe this process as an intimate and committed relationship.
When there are so little words available, the translation becomes focused on the silences in between them and the process of speculation becomes more and more complex. With a commitment to this research my processes have been both intimate and distant, drawing from a far-reaching multitude of sources which find their way into the exhibition in varying gestures and forms in an attempt to articulate what is haunting the present. In The Skeleton of a Name, silence is made material and is presented as an “archive” in varying forms which are seemingly disparate but have potential for infinite routes of speculation. As an audience you are required to be active and ‘perform’ within the archive drawing your own connections between the materials from your own individual perspective. There are no answers but many possibilities.
Works directly referenced in the exhibition: The Politics of Translation by Guyatri Shakravorty Spivak (essay); Signposts of the Jumbie by Faustin Charles (novel); To a Dead Slave by Martin Carter (poem) Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva (critical theory)
All images by Matthew Arthur Williams
as part of The Skeleton of a Name by Ashanti Harris 2019
image credit: Matthew Arthur Williams
as part of The Skeleton of a Name by Ashanti Harris 2019
image credit: Matthew Arthur Williams
as part of The Skeleton of a Name by Ashanti Harris 2019
image credit: Matthew Arthur Williams
as part of The Skeleton of a Name by Ashanti Harris 2019
with performers Naomi Shoba, Adebusola Ramsay, Sekai Machache, Titana Muthui, Nabu White, Libby Odai & Ashanti Harris
image credit: Matthew Arthur Williams
as part of The Skeleton of a Name by Ashanti Harris 2019
image credit: Matthew Arthur Williams
as part of The Skeleton of a Name by Ashanti Harris 2019
image credit: Matthew Arthur Williams