Exhibition Text

“Natal alienation. [...] Made foreign. To be foreign in this sense was to be without legacy, memory, or origin. What is a direction that begins nowhere?” - Unknown Author, On social death, Collective Climb

Pilgrimage (Message for the Atlantic) is an exploration into the Black past, or rather, the absence of one. The Black-American experience is one that lacks universal land, language, and specificity–our ancestry is amorphous, lost to the roiling water and the dark depths of the Atlantic, where African bodies met the cold ocean and had their cultural ties severed with every mile sailed away from the Motherland. Black-American culture is rich, lively, and real, but its origins are murky; in our search for our ancestors we find ourselves at the shore, the foamy tide lapping at our feet. Message for the Atlantic is a study in speculation, in grieving what is lost and unrecoverable, and reconciling with a lack of beginning. Through objects, video, sound, and ritual, this exhibition pieces together the void of Black origin and traverses Black becoming and evolution, utilizing personal archives and known history to construct a past, a present, and a future. This is a space to yearn for what was lost to the Atlantic, to grieve and eat and be together, to “tend to the Black dead and dying”–to be in the Wake.