Balm (Steps to Unforgetting)

Balm (Steps to Unforgetting), 2021

commissioned for Impossible Performances (www.impossibleperformances.org), A project organised by artist and curator Helen Davison

Filmed by Alex Gulino

Materials: Honey, found burnt tree branch, twine rope, bowls, white paint

In the book ‘Lose your Mother’, Saidiya Hartman mentions an account in which captured and enslaved West Africans were forced into submission by their captors, after having ‘encircled a tree of forgetfulness’ in a slave port in Ouidah, Benin, during the transatlantic slave trade. The act erased memories of their cultures and homes and made them forget their collective pasts and identities.

In this work, I begin exploring cycles, grief and the trees' abilities to store memory. I'm looking at the (im)possibilities or difficulties of placing loss, and the importance of private/collective acts of remembrance in our present and future lives.