MEET EMILY CARRIS + Wayne Modest

Emily asks "What does salt know?" in a presentation on her art+research process

Emily discusses the transatlantic trade in enslaved persons, and how her art and life are deeply informed by her archival research into the wisdoms and forms of care that enslaved Africans brought with them.

Emily Carris began her presentation posing a question she first asked during her studies in photography in England, while contemplating an image of a slave ship in a tumultuous ocean.... "what does salt know?" Seven years later, Emily returned to Philadelphia where she contemplated the possibilities of a space that joined art production, research, and community intervention, eventually founding the Art Dept. Collective in Fishtown, Philadelphia. In her own art practice, Emily began intensively researching the medium and materiality of dyes, textiles, fibres, and medicines in her work with archival portraiture and imagery of enslaved persons. In a memorable example, Emily described how she worked to craft an iron dye by submerging antique slave shackles in alcohol where they slowly dissolve. Engaging with Black women’s traditions of quilting, textile work, and healing, one of Emily’s most exhibited pieces features indigo and silk matta root embroidered over the raised whip scars on a famous portrait of “Peter,” an enslaved man who escaped from a Louisiana plantation in 1868. She is following this interest in textiles and quilting to explore the concept of armor as clothing, and the powerful historical intersections of quilting and warrior culture. 

Wayne Modest introduces the Research Center for Material Culture

Following Emily Carris's presentation, dr. Prof. Wayne Modest began by introducing his current project as the Director of the Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC). The RCMC is ann integrated center for research into ethnographic collections in the Netherlands exploring the meanings, political histories, and material flows that objects in these collections raise. He began his talk with an insightful provocation: “What happens to a history of design if we look outside the West...or teach a history of photography starting in 1842 in Jamaica rather than one starting in 1839 in Europe?” Pointing to the other histories that remain to be written, and the voices that remain to speak, Wayne argued that ethnographic objects in these collections carry within them ways of thinking history and write history otherwise. Museums can choose to draw attention to these revolutionary potentials, and in so doing call attention to, and work to un-silence, the systematic muting of the colonial violence and harm that these collections often emerged out of. Wayne highlighted the importance of asking, rather than just assuming, whether or not museums as “salvage” institutions borne out of the colonial projects driving people’s to extinction in the first place, can be or should be repaired

These presentations were followed by a lively discussion session and lunch that grappled with the complicity of scholars, academics, and artistis working in insitutions deeply involved in the colonial project. Several attendees highlighted how uncomfortable such institutional complicity is, and in response others spoke of the need to live with and in this discomfort rather than dismiss it: Institutional repair requires work, and part of that work can be done by laying claim to institutional spaces in the way we speak, move, and gather, and in so doing carve out spaces for other voices and other histories. Following this discussion, other smaller discussions occurred around repatriating photography, the question of archival and imagery ownership, and the revolutionary histories embedded within objects that we are obligated to preserve though we may not yet be able to hear them.

A lively discussion.