My art practice is sankofic in nature because of the tension with space and time and Western culture and Indigenous African Caribbean culture. I stand here in the present, my feet facing forward; I am also stretching back to my AfroCaribbean indigenous roots that show me what it means to be an artist, a storyteller, and a practitioner. In order to do this - to live out my life as an artist in this sense, I must reshape this article and what it means to write for and to you and ask that we presence ourselves with each other instead. I invite you as a collaborator.  An artist in the West African Indigenous sense of the word is a collaborator with community, Spirit, and other worlds.  She stands like the sankofic figure in the present moment while she makes way for community to access another world. She is an access point where one world opens to another.  So I invite you collaborators. I invite you into this ritual, this ceremony, into the practice. 

Before we go any further I am required to ask for your consent to continue.  I ask that you would presence yourself. The act of presencing comes in the form of a call and response that has been handed down to me and others like myself.  I will invite you by saying Kwik (the regular text below) and you can respond if you wish to collaborate with me by saying Kwak out loud (the bold text below). I will repeat this throughout the article. Let’s begin. 

(Read the regular text and say the bold text out loud)

Kwik

Kwak

Kwik

Kwak

In the summer of 2022 I held what most people would consider an exhibit but I refer to as a gathering. The Body Speaks was a gathering that featured over 15 mostly large sized watercolour and oil paintings that came out of a participant action research “project” I conducted from 2020 to 2022.  The interesting thing to note is that this “project” did not come from any desire to meet the demands of an institution.  It started with my exploration of the way stories lived within my body and the ways I could harvest those stories for myself. At first I called the project Truth Over Beauty because I wanted to investigate what it would look like if I documented myself in pictures, looking for truth rather than beauty.  In this age of selfies and an over documentation of the self to conceal the self, I was interested in how I could locate the self within the body through stories. As I shared what I was doing with others people expressed an interest in going through what I now consider a ceremony rather than a project. The ceremony involved documenting oneself with a phone camera for a period of 10 days. Participants submitted photos that included a variety of poses such as a close up of their hands, a side profile of their body sitting, a body in the process of stretching and various other poses. After the documentation period, participants and I would meet and discuss the stories that came up through the pictures they took. These three sessions would take about an hour and would occur over a period of a year.  During that time I would sketch and paint the images that were shared by the participants. As the images went through various stages of exploration different stories would emerge.   

(Read the regular text and say the bold text out loud)

Kwik

Kwak

Kwik

Kwak

Malidoma Somé (1999) frames storytelling within a ritual that boosts imagination, supports our efforts to locate the self, connects us to ancestral knowledge, and supports our re-envisioning of our society.  This African Indigenous framing of storytelling is the foundation for my artistic projects which all involve civic engagement. I position my art making as tools that support ritual, ceremony, and self and community integration. Storytelling provides a path for the community to locate themselves in the story. This can be characterized as a form of “Indigenous technology that is aimed at returning people to their origin - the Spirit world” (Somé, 1999, p. 71). Storytelling then becomes a localizer and a transporter— one that both identifies where you are as home and carries you to another space at the same time.  Through this process you are connected to the “common energy of Spirit” (Somé, 1999). To put it another way you are integrated into the larger community that includes the physical, spiritual, and natural world.

(Read the regular text and say the bold text out loud)

Kwik

Kwak

Kwik

Kwak

As I mentioned above, locating the self in the story supports self integration and community integration. In Afro-Caribbean Indigenous storytelling practices such as Kwik Kwak the story teller invites the participants to locate themselves through the use of call and response. The use of sound and silence as partners in spaces for consent in art experiences speaks to African Indigenous values of relating, reciprocity, interconnectedness, unique expression, dialogue and integration. When the storyteller shouts “Kwik” and awaits the “Kwak” response they are not just looking for an audience, they are looking for collaborators. The call and response speaks to ideas of wholeness within community.  The community is complete when all who make up the community are located within the story of the community. The Body Speaks was a way to locate Black, Brown, Asian, Biracial, Femme, and woman bodies as collaborators within the story.  During the gathering the larger community was invited in to bear witness to sonic and visual stories while locating themselves in the gathering by documenting and harvesting their own stories through the body.  The visual and sonic pieces were tools that supported this locating work for both the individual and the community.  

(Read the regular text and say the bold text out loud)

Kwik

Kwak

Kwik

Kwak

Campt (2021) speaks of “sonic protection” (p.149) in describing the way Simone Leigh invites you into the Loophole of Retreat exhibit with childhood clapping.  Campt also describes the way sound is used as a way to create a barrier when she shares the story of Debbie Africa giving birth in prison.  “Debbie Africa was eight months pregnant when she (started serving) forty years in prison...she secretly gave birth to her son David in her cell…her incarcerated sisters…stood vigil outside her cell and sang, coughed, or created other forms of sonic interference to shield her child from detection” (Campt, 2021, p. 149-150). Sound and storytelling for the African diaspora is a locator, dialogue instigator, consent form, and protection all at once. During The Body Speaks participants entered a room where large canvases held the visual stories while the sonic stories played. The sonic stories overlapped each other, acting as a form of sonic protection for the parts of the stories that were not meant to be extracted but were meant to be heard. I was speaking to the question of how we protect and share stories at the same time. If “knowability” and “legibility” (Springgay, 2022) are our aim, then we are in a relationship that is about extraction and consumption rather than connection and care. Considering what the overlapping sonic sounds represent in the gathering is understanding that there needs to be room for the spaces that are not always legible and knowable.  

(Read the regular text and say the bold text out loud)

Kwik

Kwak

Kwik

Kwak

Recently I returned to my birthplace—the island of Dominica/Waitikubuli. While I was there I was fortunate to witness a full moon.  The light from the full moon was so bright I felt it all around me despite the darkness I was saturated in.  During the trip I spent most of my time thinking about my great grandmother who was responsible for sharing the stories in the village of Mabouche.  My great grandmother would call out to the people in the surrounding homes on the full moon. The little village I was born in sits right at the edge of a great big sea.  The sea roars and at times can drown out voices that are too quiet.  So much was the need for Ma Bessie’s constant echolocating. So much was the need to presence herself within the community and the community to presence themselves within the gathering with “here”, “here”, “here”. 

(Read the regular text and say the bold text out loud)

Kwik

Kwak (here)

Kwik

Kwak (here)

Kwik

Kwak (here)

As Ma Bessie would step outside her small galvanized steel roofed home, she sent out sound all around her. She would shout Kwik as a way of locating the collaborators to her storytelling.  Others hearing her sound would return it back to her and respond with Kwak.  And so the echolocating would go. She would continue sending out the sonic invitation and allow space for the response. This practice of echolocating can be found in the way I set up the gathering The Body Speaks. The gathering had two rooms.  One room shared the large visual pieces with the loud sonic overlapping pieces and the other room held smaller pieces within a more quiet space. Each room held had its own sonic invitation and sonic protection. In the quieter room with the smaller pieces I shared a digital piece called “The Child Who Could Not Say Her Own Name” where I described the way language and voice offers their own sonic violence and protection for immigrant children. In this sonic piece I left large spaces of white where no sound or images were shared. These spaces of white represented my attempt at gaining consent and inviting the community into a locating practice.  This was more an echolocation practice, where the contrast with sound and image met a blank silent screen.  The call and the response in visual/digital form.  A form of locating that Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2021) calls “continuous presencing”.  She describes the river dolphins constant echolocating as a way of continual self locating - repeating over and over again “Here. Here. here” (Gumbs, 2021). It is more than simply I’m here.  It is I am here, in this moment, right now, and I offer my presence (Gumbs, 2021) to you. 

Kwik

Kwak (here)

Kwik

Kwak (here)

Kwik

Kwak (here)