Wake: grief, celebration, memory, and those among
the living who, through ritual, mourn their passing and celebrate
their life in particular the watching of relatives and friends
beside the body of the dead person from death to burial and the
drinking, feasting, and other observances incidental to this.
In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture
the present.
—Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
A silent hum.
In the quietude of contemplation, where the past and present converge, the exhibition unfolds like an elegy, a reflective homage to the intricate dance of memory, identity, and time within the African Diaspora. This exhibition and its contemplation navigate the waters of bearing witness, keeping watch, and mourning—each artist contributing a verse to this elegiac narrative.
Christina Sharpe’s meditation on living “in the wake” offers a poignant framework for this reflection. “Wake work,” as she delineates, is a practice of attending to the past’s persistent echoes in our present lives, a form of resistance against the tide of forgetting. It is within this wake that we find Leo Asemota’s Map of a City (2001), an intricate mapping of memory and witness through the urban landscape of London. Asemota’s photographs within the booklet of witness appeal boards scattered throughout the city serve not merely as documentation but as a visual elegy to the myriad unnamed lives that have shaped, and been shaped by, the city’s history. This work, in capturing the ephemeral messages of appeal, underscores the act of witnessing as both a communal and a deeply personal endeavour, echoing Sharpe’s assertion that “the wake” is a shared space of mourning and memory.
With Gaufi and Kgakala (2023), Lerato Shadi’s large raw linen canvases marked in red with a flow of thoughts, embody the temporal and tactile dimensions of memory. Each stroke and word inscribed upon the canvases speaks to the personal and collective narratives of the Diaspora, narratives that, as bell hooks reminds us, are deeply intertwined with the politics of recognition and belonging. Shadi’s work, in its raw and evocative form, invites us to imagine the possibilities of healing and connection through the act of bearing witness to our own stories and those of others.
Helena Uambembe’s installation, Blooming in Statis (2023), offers a counterpoint to the themes of movement and change. Here, stasis is not synonymous with silence or absence but is instead a resonant space filled with the echoes of past struggles and triumphs. This work embodies Akwaeke Emezi’s reflections on the self as a site of constant becoming, where identity is neither fixed nor singular but is instead an ongoing negotiation with the past and the present. “I am, always, a multitude of multitudes,” Emezi writes, inviting us to consider the ways in which our identities are shaped by the histories we carry and the futures we imagine.
Reflecting on Naomi Di Meo’s elegy to her younger self, the exhibition invites a similar introspection from its viewers. Di Meo’s elegiac prose, a tender reflection on growth, loss, and the passage of time, mirrors the exhibition’s engagement with the notion of bearing witness not only to the external world but also to the landscapes within ourselves. It is a reminder that mourning and memory are not merely about looking backward but are also acts of self-compassion and recognition, a way of honouring the journey of becoming.
In the subtle interplay of light and shadow, “Notes on the Wake: Rhapsody and Lamentations in Three Acts” weaves a tapestry of loss and love, a collective and individual elegy to the Diasporic experience. Through the works of Asemota, Shadi, and Uambembe, and the reflective words of Sharpe, hooks, Emezi, and Di Meo, the exhibition stands as a testament to the power of holding space for mourning, for memory, and for the myriad ways we keep watch over the echoes of our shared and singular histories. In this space, time is embodied not as a linear progression but as a rich palimpsest, a living archive of what has been, what is, and what might yet be.
—Mistura Allison
at Villa Romana, Florence
until March 30, 2024