C-print, selected photographs from the commission by Autograph ABP for AMPLIFY - STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE AFRO EUROPEAN MATTERS

Five black female performers are conjoined by long corn rows. They are presented in poetic still photos from the forest, performing between and in the trees. While the conjoined hair points to a shared existence, the piece refers to spirituality, to ancestral connectivity and “different ecologies of care” – within the African diaspora as well as towards the planet.

The images were part of the exhibition Diasporic frequencies: sacred ecopoetics at Rønnebæksholm, Denmark. Diasporic frequencies: sacred ecopoetics is a gathering, in many senses of the word. In the solo exhibition, Jeannette Ehlers gathers herself alongside two other invited Afro-European women artists[1][2] : patricia kaersenhout and Lydia Östberg Diakité. They are all deeply rooted (and routed) to the elements of earth, air, and water.[1] For these artists, the experience of being Black is not dependent on a relationship with whiteness but is bound to the environment of ecological elements. Through performances of flight and fugitivity, these elements gather towards spiritual transcendence. Yet, they are not grasped and contained. Instead, they are released, dissolved, and returned. These artists perform and reimagine Afro-diasporic traditions of song and dance which ambiguates the natural and cultural, the real and the mythological, the authentic and imaginary, the representable and unknowable. Furthermore, these performances are poetic in that they express a language of fugitivity and survival. Such expressions do not merely speak of the earth and other elements but speak from and as these elements. This exhibition invites us to think of the Afro-diaspora as a poetics that is always connected to an environmental ecology, its elements and spirits.

[1] This perspective draws from Denise Ferreira da Silva. See 2022. Unpayable Debt. London: Sternberg Press, 2002: 46, where she asserts: “the elemental (as opposed to the physical) moment of matter, [is] the point of departure for thinking.”