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HOME/LAND

EXCAVATION: A SITE OF MEMORYSYLVIA D. HAMILTON

18 October to 1 December 2013DALHOUSIE ART GALLERY

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IN JUNE OF 2012, a consortium of winery owners and winemakers in Nova Scotia launched Tidal Bay, a brand name for a “crisp and slightly dry” white wine produced by ten provincial wineries following strict criteria rooted in the historic European system of ‘appellations’ — that is, a series of protected names under which wines are produced and sold using approved grapes cultivated in specific geographic regions. The website of the Winery Association of Nova Scotia further describes this first ap-pellation in the province: “In Nova Scotia, our wines have consistently been known for their fresh, crisp and bright style. A wine with unique character, Tidal Bay brilliantly reflects the terroir, coastal breezes and cooler climate of its birthplace.” Rooted in the French word terre (“land”) the term terroir is used in the wine industry to describe spe-cial characteristics and attributes within a geographic

and geologic territory in relationship to local climatic conditions and other organic features such as the acidity of the soil and the presence of wild and ambient yeasts. Terroir also takes into account the human decision-mak-ing process about which varieties of grapes to grow on specific lands and whether to capture wild yeast as the kick-starter in the fermentation process or to apply cul-tured yeast – all facets of production that will affect the outcome of the final wine. Indeed, the use of oak barrels in the fermentation process will positively enhance the subtle effects of the geographic terroir present in some wines and possibly mask positive attributes in others. Ter-roir, then, represents the sum of the effects that the local physical and climatic environment has on the production of wine in concert with interwoven sequences of the human decision-making process.

INDIVIDUALLY, THE WORD ‘HOME’ conjures up a social space of birth beginnings, or the human living space within the architectural construction known as a house. ‘Land’, on the other hand, implies earth, physical territory, geographic and/or political space that has limits if not borders and boundaries. Placing the words ‘home’ and ‘land’ within proximity of each other can generate added layers of meaning; abutting them to form the single word ‘homeland’ manufactures a term fraught with nationalistic and militaristic overtones when combined into phrases such as ‘homeland security’. In the title of this exhibition, the words ‘home’ and ‘land’ are aligned but kept distinct by the slash, not operating as a single term but as two words that are magnetically attracted to each other as partners in an interconnected relationship. In this installation-based exhibition by Sylvia D. Hamil-ton and Wilma Needham, the artists have each created projects that explore their ‘home/land’ — their individ-ual experiences of home in relation to the land where

CURATORIAL INTRODUCTION

By Peter DykhuisDirector/CuratorDalhousie Art Gallery

they were born: a relationship in which the social and geographic spheres combine to have added cultural sig-nificance. In Hamilton’s world, ‘home/land’ is the diasporic African Canadian experience of life in Nova Scotia; for Needham, it is the city of Niagara Falls and the natural, geographic features that gave it its name. The concept of terroir is a useful entry into this work. It is relevant to consider how Hamilton’s and Needham’s artwork grew out of the social, cultural and political terroir that their lives are rooted in where their profes-sional practices are cultivated. What are the historical (or temporal) arcs of their projects? What (or where) are the roots of the issues in the work? Who (or what) has been transplanted? Whose stories are being told (or chan-neled)? Which way are the political breezes (or hurricane winds) blowing? What role does the Gallery, as a ‘cask’ for the installations, play to enhance (or water down) the elements of the social/cultural exchange? And how are we each the product of our own terroir?

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A MATERIALIST HISTORIAN, according to Walter Benjamin, must act as “one who digs,” to pull signs from the past into a new confrontation with the present4. This concept of quotation serves as a starting point referencing the theory and practice of memorialisation central to the creative practice of Nova Scotian artist Sylvia D. Ham-ilton. For over the past three decades, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, writer, activist and educator has been dedicated to excavating and exposing the buried histories, experiences and contributions of African-Cana-dians neglected within the dominant historical and cultur-al narratives of the nation. Hamilton’s conceptualization of memory manifests itself largely through the collection and preservation of oral histories, retrieving forms of testimony in order to acknowledge the genealogies of black existence in Canada which date back over four hundred years. Working archeologically to unearth hid-den stories or forgotten archives, Hamilton’s work does not simply offer a compensatory history for that which has been lost or omitted in the Canadian historic lexicon. Rather, in keeping with the historic materialism expressed by Benjamin in his “Thesis on Philosophy and History,” it “brushes history against the grain” to reveal how racial domination and colonization have situated black subjects and their geopolitical concerns as being “elsewhere,” a

spatial practice that erases and obscures the situated knowledge of these communities and their contributions to real and imagined human geographies.5 Excavation: A Site of Memory has the artist em-ploying the “situational aesthetics” of contemporary installation-based practice to explore how systems of representation that produce “the past” as a functioning social discourse are imagined, recuperated, transposed and positioned within public and private spaces. Her work also asks us to consider how testimony might take the form of objects and images, in addition to the words of eyewitnesses and the memories of survivors. Utiliz-ing a combination of video footage, still photographs, audio, text, archival documents as well as an inventory of personal and found objects, Hamilton invites her audiences to imaginatively travel across time and space to engage with narratives that bring to life stories of early black settlement. These are stories of both hardship and resilience, informed by multiple histories of migration beginning with the Middle Passage from Africa to the Atlantic, to journeys from slavery to liberation during the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the War of 1812 (1812-1814). Nova Scotia has the distinction of having the earliest population of free African people in North America. At the same time, as Hamilton’s work attests,

MINING MEMORYSylvia D. Hamilton’s Art of Telling History

By Pamela Edmonds

…the artist serves as the historic agent of memory, while the archive emerges as a place in which concerns with the past are touched by the astringent vapors of death, destruction and degeneration…it is also within the archive that acts of remembering and regeneration occur, where a suture between the past and present is performed, in the indeterminate zone between event and image, document and monument. — Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument1

Much remains unspoken about the historical fact that Nova Scotia was a slave society, and the traces of its legacy haunt us still: in the names of prominent Nova Scotians, in street names, in archival records and in churches. African people were present here from the earliest period of European colonization. My ancestors were the Black Refugees from the War of 1812. I am their witness.— Sylvia D. Hamilton, Artist statement from Excavation: A Site of Memory2

Until we excavate our history, we will never know who we are. — James Baldwin, The Image, Three Views3

Installation view of Freedom Runners (detail)

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“it was also a slave society—a fact much hidden and its traces and legacy, rarely discussed nor acknowledged.”6 Working with what might be called the “evidence effect” of artefacts, Hamilton’s display allows for an otherwise inexpressible history to be imagined through a materialist autotopography. In Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, art historian Jennifer A. González describes this as similar to an autobiography, however “an autotopography…is a practice of claiming ontopological rights through the preservation and display of personal objects: the right to exist, the right to a story, and the right to a territory, whether imaginary or actual, where the psyche of the subject dwells and leaves behind a physical trace.”7 Tracing her own family history, as a descendent of Black Refugees who settled in the community of Beechville, Nova Scotia, Hamilton builds and imagines a powerful and evocative archive of Afri-can-Nova Scotian life within the gallery space, re-telling personal and communal histories to stake claims to space and place. The entrance to the exhibition presents re-produced prints of actual advertisements in Nova Scotian newspa-pers with details of a slave auction, the search for a ‘run-

away slave’ or ‘freedom runner” as Hamilton’s preferred term which are juxtaposed with poems in the imagined voices of the “Freedom runners.” Two large wooden barrels, called “hogsheads” and a mound of potatoes on the gallery floor stand asin haunting reminders of human bodies reduced to bartered objects. Hamilton juxta-poses compelling poetic verses, presented as wall texts throughout the space, which give voice life and life to the imagined experiences of adversity and resistance related to the individual and communal will to survive. In another part of the space, she includes five 12 foot wall mounted paper scrolls which tower in scale and presence, listing individual names drawn from archival records docu-menting the presence of Black Loyalist, Maroon, Black Refugee and enslaved Africans in Nova Scotia from the 1700’s to 1815. The names of African people — enslaved and free are also read into the record through an audio soundscape with actual names drawn from T. W. Smith’s The Slave in Canada, and Black Loyalist and Black Refugee archival records. These acts of affirmation also reflects the annual practice of African Baptist churches which record and acknowledge in their church minutes the passing of community members.

Similar to West African griots, revered traditional storytellers entrusted to keep memories to pass on to future generations, Hamilton mines her own memories in another section of the installation, visitors observe remnants of her own family genealogy at a wooden desk stacked with a collection of treasured objects, including hair combs, her grandmother’s handmade quilt, books and photographs. She also includes a video projection of a short film titled “Keep on Keepin On” (2004), a work she refers to as a “visual poem” that chronicles the distinct development of African Nova Scotian communities as told through her personal history and research. Melville Island, a former prison used to house free Black Refugees, is re-imagined in poetic text, photographic image, archival record and projected images of rocky shorelines. Com-bined they relay how bodies of water have linked human bodies via the trans-Atlantic slave trade as well as through the emigration of Black Loyalists to Sierra Leone in 1792. Projected images of Halifax Harbour and Melville Island (used as a receiving depot for black refugees es-caping slavery in the United States) relay how bodies of water have linked human bodies via the trans-Atlan-ticslave trade as well as through the migration of Black Loyalists to Sierre Leone in 1792. Pairing these compelling landscapes with poems (presented as text and audio) such as “The Passage”, opens up new ways of thinking about how African diasporic subjects have and continue to negotiate and re-narrativize the contested historical and contemporary geographies of the new world. Taken as a whole, this compelling, viscerally-charged exhibition is a synthesized journey through a temporal ‘site of memory’ where the real and the imagined co-exist, embracing the concept articulated by French historian Pierre Nora.8 Memory and history are not seen as fixed, linear or static, but as moving, changing and persisting into the present. Hamilton acts as intermediary and partic-ipant across generations of lived history collecting stories and re-appropriating experiences that serve as lessons to be passed down to future generations. With an impetus to continue and encourage dialogue and dissemination, Hamilton also invites gallery visitors to engage in the process of leaving a ‘memory’ where she has installed an-other desk with a blank notebook to fill. This work aligns itself similarly with what critic Andreas Huyssen terms “memory sculpture” and, in so doing, transfers the work of remembering from artist to viewer. Huyssen identifies the emergence of artistic projects that “perform a kind of memory work that activates body, space, and tempo-rality, matter and imagination, presence and absence in a complex relationship with their beholder.”9 These works, which occupy not the public spaces of monuments and memorials but the more intimate spaces of the museum or gallery, address individuals at a corporeal level, even

though the human body is often “just as absent and elu-sive as it would be in any memory of the past.” 10 Hamilton’s work gives voice to the stories of individuals silenced by racism and colonialism, she does not speak for them, but finds ways to bring these individuals for-ward to speak for themselves through counter-histories and counter-memories. In doing this, we can imagine the everyday and local lives of communities and their cultural identifications, as implicit to the past and presently remembered landscape. By touching viewers in a way that produces an affective response, Excavation revives the principle of oral tradition through not only auditory, but visual and other sensorial means. Here the resiliency of the African spirit is a testimony to endurance, adaption and the ability to evolve while embarking on continual processes of imaginative recovery.

NOTES

1 Okwui Enwezor. “Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument,” in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, exhibition cata-logue, (New York: Steidl/ICP, 2008), 11.

2 Sylvia D. Hamilton. Unpublished artist statement, 2013.

3 Malcolm Preston, “The Image: Three Views- Ben Shahn, Darious Mihaud and James Baldwin Debate the Real Meaning of a Fashionable Term” in Conversations with James Baldwin, eds. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, (University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 12.

4 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, (London: New Left Books, 1973), 257.

5 Ibid.

6 Sylvia D. Hamilton. Unpublished artist statement, 2013.

7 Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), 19.

8 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7-24.

9 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, (Standford: Standford University Press, 2003), 67.

10 Ibid.

Installation view of Naming Names, Mining My Archives, and Mama Hamilton’s Quilt

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WORKS IN EXHIBITIONDimensions are in centimetres, height precedes width, precedes depth. Works are collection of the artist.

This exhibition is installed in five sections that each display text, images, objects and media.

Freedom Runnersmultimedia installation consisting of: wall-mounted vinyl text, digital text panels of poetry and historical news clippings; two oak barrels; potatoes, red ribbon and severed dreadlocked hairdimensions varyvideo: Gull Island 2013 (0:48)

Melville Islandmixed media installation consisting of: digitally printed photograph and text panels of poetry; electro-set historical certificate on mylardimensions vary

Naming Namesmultimedia installation consisting of: digitally printed “The Ledger” panel; five digitally printed columns of names on suspended fabric; audio recitation of names“The Ledger” 91.0 × 71.0; fabric panels 336.0 × 91.0 each

Mining My Archivesmixed media installation consisting of: digital text panels of poetry; antique table and stool with collection of personal memorabilia, combs, cameras and news clippings; books and basketsdimensions vary

Mama Hamilton’s Quilt c.1966 cotton and wool185.0 × 178.0

Unidentified 2013digital photograph43.7 × 66.0

Jason Harper, Blacksmith, St John, NB 1978 two contemporary black and white digital prints generated from 35mm negatives45.7 × 30.5 each

VIDEOS:Leaving Home 1975 (2:36)Sierra Leone Odyssey 1996 (22:47)Keep On Keepin’ On 2004 (2:85)

Leave a Memorymultimedia installation consisting of: desk and chair; Memory Book and pen dimensions varyvideo: Waters of the Diaspora: The Passage 2013 (1:02)projection over vinyl text

I am who they imagined.

When we came here more than two hundred years ago, they thought, no hoped, we would not survive. We’d be a burden on the scarce resources of the new society. But survive we did. We made a way out of no way. We had to. For them: our kin who died in the Middle Passage. We survived for them, and for the children they would never know. For the children like me, from generations in the future. I am who they imagined.

Memory is a non-linear, non-chronological mobius strip; it is fluid, porous, a collage. In this temporal site of memory the real and the imagined co-exist. Much remains unspoken about the historical fact that Nova Scotia was a slave society, and the traces of its legacy haunt us still: in the names of prominent Nova Scotians, in street names, in archival records and in churches. African people were present here from the earliest period of European colonization. My ancestors were the Black Refugees from the War of 1812. I am their witness.

I am who they imagined.

EXCAVATION: A SITE OF MEMORY

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Installation view of Freedom Runners

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Thursday of Gull Island

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Thursday waited for the tides to leave.

She walked the sand out to the island

taking her footprints with her. She was not hiding.

Just not where that indendure paper say she should

be.

The gulls, her watchers. The blueberries and sea kelp

her food. The evergreen boughs, her bed.

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She descend over rocks flat and jagged.

Some say she fly with the gulls. Some say

that whale wait for her just off shore.

Some say she that odd rock stuck – look there

last spit of land before the sea open.

Some say she that wave smash high, high

hugging hard rock face trying not to return to sea.

By Some Other Name

breathwait until night fall creepinto the forest bowelsrun crawl rolldown

jagged

hills breath

wade

deep inkblack lake

bog sucking swollen feet

away slip breath

bloody fingers claw moss

breath

gasping grasping

hand upon hand breath

before come the moon

Melville Island 1816 Silenced by the snowthey wondered if even Godhad finally forsaken them home a stone prisontemporary officials saywe used to temporary

come in from the fields one dayto find out we been up and soldwe invented temporary

when they line us upafter they drag us off them waterbeds of deathwe ready for a new kind of temporary

nova scarcityseed potatoes turnip tobaccogood crop in the fall

now all froze to the floor

and if we still herein springwe try again

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Installation view of Mining My Archives

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Installation view of Leave A Memory

Waters of the Diaspora: The Passage

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT:

Video stills from Sierra Leone Odyssey Keep On Keepin’ OnKeep on Keepin’ On Leaving Home

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BIOGRAPHIES SYLVIA D. HAMILTON is a multi award winning Nova Scotian filmmaker and writer who is known for her documentary films as well as her publications, public presentations and volunteer work on the local and national levels. She has published in journals and anthologies including The Dalhousie Review, West Coast Line and The Great Black North. Her most recent film is The Little Black School House produced through her company, Maroon Films Inc. She teaches part time at the University of King’s College in Halifax.

PAMELA EDMONDS is a visual and media arts curator who received her BFA and an MA in Art History from Con-cordia University, Montreal. With family ties to African Nova Scotian heritage, she is interested in developing contemporary art projects that deal with African dias-poric cultural identity and the politics of representation. Recent curated exhibitions include Bounty: Chikonze-ro Chazunguza (Gallery 101, Ottawa, 2013), 28 Days: Reimagining Black History Month (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery/Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto, 2012) and Streaming Alterity (Art Gallery of Peterborough, 2012). She is a founding member of ‘Third Space Art Projects’, a curatorial collective co-founded in 2009 with Sally Frater. It is a forum for the promotion, presentation and develop-ment of multidisciplinary art exhibitions that focus on visual cultures of the Black Atlantic.

Freedom Runners (detail)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Dalhousie Theatre Props DepartmentMaritime Museum of the AtlanticPublic Archives of Nova ScotiaDan ConlinPam EdmondsEye Candy  Lorraine Field      Dan O’BrienJuanita PetersMark Pineo    Katrina Pyne   Mike Rossi Ada Thompson  Craig Yorke and Hugo Ford, Image House Digital Inc.

Sylvia D. Hamilton recognizes the support of Arts Nova Scotia and is pleased to work in partnership with the province to develop and promote our cultural resources for all Nova Scotians.

Hamilton also gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the University of King’s College.