What does sovereignty sound like?
What does a wounded city look like?
What could repair feel like?
Tivoli Stories is a collaborative multi-media installation, book, and film project focused on the state of emergency that began in Jamaica on 24 May 2010, when police and military forces entered Tivoli Gardens and other West Kingston communities. The security forces were to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, leader of the Shower Posse and “don” of the community, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States to stand trial for gun and drug-related charges. By the end of the week, Dudus had not yet been found and at least 73 civilians had been killed. Tivoli Stories was designed to provide a platform through which participating West Kingston community members could narrate their experiences during those weeks, and name and publicly memorialize loved ones they lost. It is meant to contribute to a healing process in which historical silences are broken through audio and visual forms of storytelling (generated ethnographically and artistically); to align with the efforts of human rights activists locally and internationally working on issues related to state violence and extrajudicial killing; and to position this instance of extrajudicial violence in Jamaica within a broader context of the development of political nationalism in Jamaica, the history of US intervention into the region, especially during the Cold War, and the international trades in drugs and arms.
For this Reading the Moment programme, VIAD Research Associate Deborah Thomas has reconfigured and shared a selection of materials taken from the exhibition Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston (Nov 2017 - Oct 2020, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology), which was co-curated by Thomas, Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Deanne M. Bell
Bearing Witness …
All photographs by Varun Baker
Four Days in May: Kingston 2010 …
An Experimental Documentary by Deborah A. Thomas, Deanne M. Bell, and Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn | 40 minutes (English, Jamaican Patois)
A collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker Deborah A. Thomas, musician and composer Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, and psychologist Deanne M. Bell, this experimental documentary explores the archives generated by state violence by focusing on the 2010 State of Emergency in West Kingston, Jamaica. The film features community residents talking about what they experienced during the “incursion,” and naming and memorializing loved ones they lost. Through the use of archival film and photographs, footage from the U.S. drone that was overhead during the operation, and contemporary hyper-realist film photography of the “garrison” of Tivoli Gardens, it encourages viewers to think about their own relationships to these entanglements.
Click below to view the full film (40 mins) (Password: TivoliSOE2010) / available until 28 February 2021
Kumina - a listening session …
What could repair feel like? Screenings of Four Days in May evoke painful memories for those individuals, families and communities affected by the 2010 incursion and its traumatic repercussions, and raise difficult questions about the history of political violence and its relationships to illicit transnational trades. How these screenings are ‘held’ demands, as such, an attentiveness to the entangled social, political and relational conditions of care, and repair. With this thinking, a number of screenings in Kingston and other locations across the country have been followed by a Kumina - a community gathering of song, rhythm and dance practiced by many Jamaicans as embodied forms of memory, ancestral invocation, and release.
"Kumina was developed by members of the self-described Bongo Nation in eastern Jamaica, the area that has led the resistance to colonialism, that birthed the Morant Bay Rebellion and that inspired the founding father of the movement of Rastafari, Leonard Howell. Though geographically dispersed, particularly across the parish of St. Thomas, members of the Bongo Nation looked to the Congo-Angola and Guinea Coast regions of Africa as the home of their oldest ancestors. They found in the tradition of Kumina a unifying cultural heritage, one that interweaves musical, linguistic, movement, and spiritual practices that connect them to the ancestors. Kumina is, therefore, an embodied archive of our history. It is also the tradition that is at the root of the popular music of reggae and dancehall” - Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn
Click below for a Kumina playlist released by Ancient Vibrations, in collaboration with the St. Thomas Kumina Drummers Collective, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.
In conversation …
What could repair feel like? Rethinking witnessing, community and form through experimental approaches to ethnographic and artistic story-telling.
Join Deborah Thomas and Chris Wessels on Thursday 11 February (18:00 SAST / 11:00 EST ) for an interactive dialogue around questions of community, space, diaspora and witnessing. The idea of this intimate and focussed session will be to draw participants into an engaged discussion centred around the ethical, political as well as practical challenges faced by artists, filmmakers and other creative practitioners engaging new audiences and communities in a moment marked by national lockdowns, radical discrepancies in material and digital access, and exacerbated structures of raced and gendered violence.
Deborah and Chris will open the session with a discussion around Deborah’s collaborative project Tivoli Stories, as well as a broader reflection on questions of form, and how as critical story-tellers they are adapting to shifting audiences and conditions of witnessing. This will then open to discussion, and participants are encouraged to bring questions and also to share from their own experiences as creative practitioners. As this will be an interactive, small-group forum, places are limited (register below).
Christopher Wessels is a South African cinematographer and a lecturer in the Film and Television department at the Wits School of Arts (WSOA). He is a founding member of Third Space (2014-2016), a collective of artists and curators in Helsinki. He is also a founding member and co-artistic director of the Museum of Impossible Forms, established in 2017 as an antiracist and queer-feminist project, a heterogeneous space, and as an experimental and migrant form of expression.
Deborah Thomas, VIAD RA (photo: Kyle Cassidy)
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