Who We Be
 

we geh fambul all ‘bout: , …and this FOREVER
Text and curation by Berette Macaulay

 

When we look, listen, and feel near or far, we find in Earth’s waters from shore to shore that we are everywhere, connected through blood deep memories that flow away from loss into constant rediscovery.  Our actions kindle culture making, resistance, jokes, dances, tears, screams of joy, mystic fabulations, spirit code, and sonic reverberations. Adama Delphine Fawundu (Brooklyn) and Sharita Towne (Portland), artists born on the East and West coasts of North America and into Black diaspora, live, create, and archive in the expanse of this indistinguishable wonder, communicating across waters and land with diasporic siblings, and here they relay these communications back to each other as if they are traveling together.  Their films were created in the reaches of Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, North America, and Sierra Leone. Both artists being avid travelers transgress the notion of ‘the stranger’ and fugitivity into empowering kinships that forge connections across the Black globe. Their films are concurrently short and eternal, offering as much as is given by ancestors, caretakers, and inheritors yet to be born.  As we Walk the Block we can see, smell, and hear their communal calls in Central District, expanding kin already present in the multicultural and multilinguistic Black corridor of Cherry Street.

 

“Our ancestors never failed to put us together.”

Valda Nogueira