My fathers left.
2023-24
Research project, workshops, text, sound.

Comission for Borealis Festival for Experimental Music, Bergen. 2023.
Exhibition Borealis Festival for Experimental Music, Bergen. 2024.

My Fathers Left is a sound and video installation, in the form of a poetic sonic essay housed within a wooden listening structure, and collaborative project. The work has been commissioned for Borealis Festival for Experimental Music, opening on 14th March 2024.

My Fathers Left explores the narratives around Black fatherhood, from the perspective of children of the African diaspora. The project has included a series of workshops for BIPOC in 2023, about the fears and vulnerability of storytelling, and in 2024 with Touki, a Bergen-based Black arts collective, about poetic tactics for repeating, implanting and reclaiming our own stories.

The sonic essay begins with my own exploration into how the narratives that British, Norwegian and Western society teach us shaped and warped the way I saw my relationship with my own father and my own history. The work speaks to the privileges and oppressions of white supremacy as they appear in intimate bi- and multi-racial family histories and the simultaneity of generational migration.

The sonic essay is shared as an installation, comprised of five sound channels- a mixtape played through a boombox and a video on a monitor within a wooden listening structure which holds four speakers. The work weaves together tracks from Trinidadian and Caribbean calypso, soca and reggae, a British police show from the 1990s, storytelling and writings from W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and others. The shape of the wooden structure is based on the wooden stands that are used to hold up boats when they are brought onto dry land.

A prologue to the sound installation, which was co-written during the 2023 workshops, was played at the opening Borealis Festival in 2023.

Installation photos: Thor Brødreskift for Borealis 2024.