THE BLACK ATLANTIC
Two artist from the Southern region of the US currently living abroad collaborated on depicting a solo performance titled “Djam Leeli, A Necroromantic” choreographed by Djibril Sall and photographed by Marcus Riggs.
Djam Leeli, A Necroromantic, is a performance that maps the topography of deathly blackness onto the Atlantic ocean. Where Race emerges here not only as a political identity, but as a European delusion animated by excessive production and movement along the Atlantic seas. This worked preformed by Sall navigates the entangled currents of race, migration, and displacement through the transformational energy of the ocean to abstract this history and project it into this solo performance.
As a continuation of the collaboration, Riggs and Sall interviewed one another on their collaboration and the Black Atlantic.
If you missed the initial performance, there will be a re-staging at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin Germany on March 19th.
How did the themes of displacement and migration begin to shape your choreography, and how do you see movement as a language for expressing those experiences?
Djibril (D): My first solo in school–13 years ago–was inspired by Phyllis Wheatley’s poem, “Being Brought from Africa to America.” So it was a foregone conclusion that migration and displacement would be the central theme of my work going forward even though then I didn’t realize it. I started dancing because I had leukemia when I was in high school and I needed to rehabilitate my body. In doing so, I discovered that dance was able to discharge all of the pain, dissociation, and anger I felt during my chemotherapy. The written and spoken word failed me but dance was the only container that could hold what I was feeling. Dance holds complexity like no other art form and if people were willing to befriend their bodies, they would understand this.
As a photographer, how do you approach capturing ephemeral, performance-based work—especially something as layered and abstract as Djibril’s piece?
Marcus (M): To be honest when it comes to working with other artists and their craft, I let them be the experts in their field I am photographing. I will take the role as the fly on the wall and capture whatever it is that I perceive to be beautiful. So in essence, I try to create a space where the artist can feel comfortable with me as a person and in the space to fully express their art through their performance. So in a way, it’s establishing creative trust and safety before the collaboration begins. I don’t want to interfere other than doing my part which is capturing a beautiful moment in time.
Both your practices resist overly didactic messaging. How do you navigate the line between guiding the audience and letting them find their own meaning in your work?
D: I don’t like people telling me what to do or how to feel so I extend the same courtesy to my audience. I embed a certain philosophy of how someone should approach my art within my work but I don’t hold people to it. Now whether you leave the event frustrated or in conversation with the work depends on whether you accept the work on its own terms or whether you want to extract from it, but that’s a decision you have to make. I don’t tell you what you think and I don’t tell you what to do but it’s up to my audience to figure out the rules–the refusals and the resistances–of my work. I consider it a healthy boundary.
M: For me, I think working towards a clear intention that sets the foundation in what / how someone will experience my work. What is it that I want to communicate as a photographer…sometimes I really don’t know what that is until I complete the work and draw parallels myself. So once that is set and I present my foundation of the work, I let people have the free will and the freedom of thought to think what they want about my photography. I don’t like forcing or presenting a strict narrative to an audience, especially when it comes to art.
What role does the Black Atlantic—both as a historical space and a metaphor—play in shaping the aesthetics of this collaboration?
M: When it comes to the Black Atlantic, I don’t think our intention was to consciously shape the aesthetic of the collaboration around that narrative. However, we also can’t deny its historical relevance, even if that influence operates more on a subconscious level. In that sense, it may have organically shaped our decision to come together as artists from the Southern region of the U.S. who are now living and working abroad.
At the same time, we are both direct results of the Black Atlantic. Our presence and our work reflect the complex beauty that has emerged from such a tragic and very real historical reality. It reminds me of a line from Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise: “I am the hope and the dream of the slave.” Taking that even further back, our ancestors were people who were made into slaves who also had hopes and dreams as people before the Black Atlantic.
In our collaboration, we try to reclaim and reframe that history by showing how we depict our own Black bodies—through movement, freedom, joy, and frustration. Through choreography, photography, and artistic collaboration, we’re imagining our own version of a utopia on the other side of the Black Atlantic.
D: The Black Atlantic is an affective medium, it holds so much emotive and psychic power: the Atlantic appears both as a historical machinery of annihilation and as a holding space for unfinished lives and unrealized futures. Through its routes, human beings were transformed into things, it fragmented ancient lineages of relationality into a collage of new fractured relations. It’s a place of paradox, a place of alchemy and I treat it as a threshold site in my work. I think of it as a utopic graveyard.
What drew you to work together on this feature, and how has your collaboration influenced the way you think about your own medium?
D: When I saw Marcus’s work, I knew I wanted to work with him. Marcus works with affect in the same way that I do: he worlds his photographs through emotive evocation. What that means is that even though Marcus’s work is restrained, feeling permeates his work and grounds his art into something that feels substantial and weighty. There is an unspoken complexity laying just beneath the surface because his work resists meaning and capture. I respect this way of working and I wanted his conceptual and aesthetic eye for my work.
M: What drew me to work with Djibril was simple; he’s another black man, from the south in the US, living abroad, and an artist who is sensitive about his shit. Very much a mirror of me and my own existence. Whenever black men collaborate with one another, it’s generally amazing work. He’s an artist that takes what he does seriously and I can admire and appreciate that level of output and thought behind his work, especially in a city like Berlin where that is lacking from my perspective.
But for this specific collaboration and how I think about my own medium (photography) was interesting and exciting for me. I mainly shoot on film with a medium format camera. When shooting on film, I’ve recently have been shooting in controlled settings such as studio and I really take my time to set the image, meter my lighting, alter positions and perspectives in such detail it can take a bit of time before I even shoot one frame. With our collaboration, Dijbril went into his piece and gradually built up momentum as it progressed. Which meant, he was creating really stunning silhouettes and forms and if I wasn’t quick, I would miss the moment. For me this was exciting and I had to react in a way as if I was doing street photography. Once you see something, go for it before the moment is gone. That’s what it was like the entire time I was working with Djibril. Being constantly inspired by his movement while I was shooting was so much fun and I wanted to make sure I showed up with the same effort that he was giving. As his energy increased, I had to match it with capturing the moment.