Meet the Artist: Rebecca Mwase, The Body as Geography
Through a guided meditation Rebecca asked us Electricians what was the most important lesson your mother taught you? What does it look like? What did it feel like? What did it sound like?
I sat there frustrated; I get frustrated quite easily, especially with matters of the body. I couldn’t seem to locate the stories within myself, I started to systematically shuffle through my memories, yet, it seemed like the more I searched the more my memories felt like they were slipping away from me. Knowing that we would likely have to share with each other what we were able to conjure, I resorted to making false memories, but even those seemed insufficient – the stories I conjured were filled with gaps, and plot holes – I had no story to tell. When it was my turn to share, I confessed I couldn’t locate a memory, I struggle with visualization, so I resorted to making making things up so I didn’t feel left out. Rebecca responded what are memories but the stories we tell ourselves?
Memories are speculative. Of course, I should know this, I am training to be a historian of course, but yet, when it came to finding and telling my own stories this very fact eluded me. I tried and failed to locate memories almost empirically, thinking naievely that I could disentangle the messiness between that which happened and that which I said to have happened.[1] But memories do not work like that, most particularly memories that come from the deepest place: matrilineal memory. This is what Rebecca re-taught me.
Rebecca’s work is to unlock out memories on the epigenetic level. The memories we both remember and create can the unfold in our cells simply because wee asked ourselves a question. As African-descended people, Rebecca believes, we all have memories of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the stories of our ancestors, these stories exist within our bodies. This is the story Rebecca renders for her audience in Vessels.
Vessels is a seven-woman harmonic meditation on the transcendental possibilities of song during the Middle Passage. Experienced within an interactive and acoustically rich sculptural environment that invokes those infamous ships, this ritual performance explores singing as a survival tool – to release spirit, reconstitute bodies, and span the gap between sanity and insanity. Using the mechanics of Black Diasporic song, Vessels ignites the musicality present in bound bodies on a move toward freedom. At its core, Vessels is a healing ritual that looks deeply at the wounds of the Middle Passage and at the creative and communal ways our ancestors endured
The body is an archive, but what Rebecca illuminated was that the body also serves as a map.
How do we map the body? Where does this map go? Nowhere, it is a map to the self.
“You found yourself. Let that be the most important relationship from now on”
While Rebecca is in residence with us, she is concerned with how matrilineal memory, the things we learned and inherited from our mothers can lead us home to ourselves. What are Black mothers able to pass on beyond our dispossession alone? What is home, how do we find it, how do we maintain it in the body? Rebecca is looking to find ways to trace and draw from our inherited lineage to combat the worlds attempt to dispossess black women and mothers from themselves and their kin. This is freedom work.
Please stay tuned to the blog and our Events page for more upcoming news and events with Rebecca Mwase.
To learn more about Vessels please check the suggested readings and playlist from Vessels' creators!
To learn more about Rebecca — http://www.rebeccamwase.com.
[1] Michel-Rolph Trouilot. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995. 22
Halle-Mackenzie Ashby