Ackee & saltfish

2019

Live performance, video 1080p, color, stereo, 12 min

The performance follows the thread of a text that the artist has written, drawing mainly on Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Stuart Hall’s Identities and Cultures, with additional quotes from Carolyn Cooper, Sonjah Stanley Niaah and Kendrick Lamar. « Water as erotic, procreative material, a place of memory, cultural dissemination and constant movement » as she understands it; « this text is a way for me to express my questions about my heritage, my identity, the concept of diaspora, but also my relationship to my own body, my femininity, to dance.”

The poem’s framework is made up of the names of dancehall steps – a culture that emerged from Jamaican sound system parties in the late 1970s. Read by the artist’s grandmother in English and Jamaican Patwa, it gives rise to the artist’s movements illustrating this ‘lexicon’. The title Ackee & saltfish, referring to the Jamaican national dish, is evocative of the artist’s memories, symbolising the cultural rapprochement and transgenerational dialogue between the artist and her grandmother.