We Insist!
2023-2025, video, colour, audio, 5’34‘’; sounds from the Flamboyant trees during the Harmattan season, excerpts from Max Roach’s We Insist!, voice and sighs by Abbey Lincoln
edited in collaboration with Dennis Ankamah Addo, Persili, Miha Sagadin
The work is part of a series dedicated to the organic library of the cashew and is presented as a vital hymn to claimed freedom. Magnified views of parts of the cashew (captured in collaboration with chemical laboratories) are accompanied by audio in which excerpts from We Insist!, sighs from the same track and the ticking of the pods of the Flamboyant legume when, during the dry season of the Harmattan wind, they open, exploding their seeds in a generative act.
Note, this is a low-resolution video. Contact me to receive the link to the high-resolution video
Exhibition
Peephole, 2026, Water Gallery, Kumasi (Ghana), curated by niiankama
The Legend of Cashew-head Persons, 2023, Former FORIG, KNUST, Kumasi (Ghana), curated by Zoe KɔKɔɔ
Atiāa Duase. A-signifying Allegory, 2023, Department of Animal Science and Technology, KNUST, Kumasi (Ghana), curated by Zoe KɔKɔɔ
Description
“We Insist!” is part of a series of works dedicated to the organic library of the cashew. It is a video on the silent “dissensus” of the cashew to the profit-driven production system, by way of confirmation of Michel Serres’s statement, ‘I have to say to my grandchildren that I still remember a childhood in a calm countryside that provided plenty of delicious fruit. Choose: empire or Earth? Up to now the latter has won’ [1]. Magnified views of the fruit, leaves and CNSL (captured with the collaboration of Chris Asare at the Oldham Laboratory, and Stephen Gyamfi at the Department of Fisheries and Watershed Management, both at the Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi), a sort of internal still life that is in motion, run accompanied by the sound of flamboyant beans opening sonorously in the Harmattan season, composed merging, in some kind of improvisation, excerpts of the “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, and Peace” soundtrack and Abbey Lincoln’s sighs from the Album by Max Roach, that in search of freedom also inspired the title of this artwork.
[1] Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, Michigan, 1997, p. 90
Image Credits
Category
- Video
