Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
The sea is a thin bright line behind a dark stone wall, and against it two young people make a music the photograph cannot hold but insists we somehow hear. He sits back into a deep lunge, an orange shirt under a grey waistcoat, cradling a kora, the long-necked calabash harp whose strings run down toward the sand at his feet. She stands facing him in a white blouse and a maroon patterned skirt, gold earrings catching the noon sun, and throws both arms straight up into the blue as if the note itself had lifted them for her, heels pressed into the pale ground.
The instrument matters. The kora belongs to the griot, the West African keeper of memory and lineage, and to set it here, on a Saint Louis seafront where the Atlantic begins, is to place song at the exact edge of departure. This is a coast from which so much was once carried away and along which so much has since returned in altered form. Idun-Tawiah lets a single ragged palm lean in from the left like an old witness, gives the whole upper half of the frame to open sky, and leaves the two figures small and bright against the dark rampart of stone.
And yet the image firmly refuses elegy. Her body is pure arrival, heels dug in, arms flung open in the oldest gesture of joy there is; his is pure effort, knees bent, weight sinking into the strings. Between them the diasporic weight of the place lightens into something a Black man and a Black woman can simply do together on a bright afternoon, which is to make a dream out of a song. The title names the ambition and the picture supplies the proof: two people, briefly and entirely, at home in the very spot that history made difficult.