Melinda Mollineaux
Random Notes – Cadboro Bay: Index to an Incomplete History
Statement by Melinda Mollineaux with a response from Andrea Fatona
The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual past.
Stuart Hall
On that day all the coloured business houses would close up shop and everyone would go in carts or on horseback to Cadboro Bay where whole sheep would be roasted on spits on the beach.
James Pilton
Examining the colonial histories of Canada’s West Coast black settlers I learned that, from the time of their 1858 arrival from California, this community held annual Emancipation Day Picnics every August 1st at Cadboro Bay. The picnics represent for me a diasporic social space and enactment of history counter to official narratives of Victoria’s British colonial “History”. Like the picnics, I use photography to say that despite a certain amount of invisibility, our experience of a life in migration occurs within a sense of place.
As someone whose sense of identity is located in hidden histories, I make art to create a visual place to inhabit. Like the idea of building bridges as we cross, I see my work as a way to ‘write’ history as we live. This impulse looks both forward and backward in the simultaneous gestures of recuperation, re-activation and creation. I believe that we are the locus of history; that it is nothing other than our everyday lives represented by and back to ourselves. This approach to history is populist in spirit, lying in opposition to official versions of History. Like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ and the Greeks who entered into death backwards, what we have before us is our past.
These large scale pinhole camera photographs of Cadboro Bay are the result of a process of surmising – remembering those folks who came to Victoria before me. I’ve spent time searching archives and libraries for traces of as many individuals as I could. I am interested in questions of hidden histories, representations of landscape and our relationship to both. I want to remember and talk about an experience of place in light of histories of exile, immigration and migration; working to overcome the fact that ‘landscape’ as a contested terrain does not make readily available the histories of all its inhabitants. A black diasporic subjective experience of ourselves connected to landscape has rarely been asserted. Even if provisional, the Cadboro Bay picnics represent a social space that challenges dominant and established narratives of Victoria’s British colonial history.
I work with a pinhole camera for its immediacy. The photographs represent a self conscious ‘capturing’ of intervals of light, history and time. I am interested in Homi Bhabha’s idea of an aesthetic process that introduces another temporality in which to signify the event of history. His notion of the ‘unhomely moment’ in literature as a rupture of deferred history, or perhaps the beginning of history: “To unspeak is both to release
from erasure and repression and to re-construct, re-inscribe the elements of the known.” He goes on to say that “in order to appear as material or empirical reality, the social process must pass through an aesthetic alienation, or privatization of its public visibility” Can historical time be thought outside fictional space? Or do they lie uncannily beside each other? I see links between Said’s enactments of a homecoming; Bhabha’s haunting of history and Teshome Gabriel’s ‘look back to the future.’
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes attempts to get to the phenomenological heart of photography. He considers photography a direct medium of time, of history. Photography by virtue of light is essentially an index to the past. Photography turns light into history by virtue of the fact that that the photograph is an indexical record of light reflected off bodies, surfaces; “the interminable truth of the ’that-has-been.’ History becomes possible only through representation and photography provides a way to translate personal experience into history. It is not enough to simply ‘capture’ history, there are larger questions of how one positions and is positioned by discourse. How can the visual engage these questions?
The Cadboro Bay photographs represent a deferred experience of place – a place of reverie. The idea of reverie is important to the process of building Gabriel’s popular memory. This is not about a reconstruction or a thwarted desire for an idyllic past. The meaning of the work is not separate from the process of its making and the conversations around it. I ask the viewer to consider the absences as well as the presences. The memory of an absence is still a memory. And memory proposes its own lived history, its own starting point. I hope this work asserts a field of interconnectedness between history, memory and photography to say that history becomes – vibrates through lived experience.
A text fragment that accompanied the photographs read:
John Craven Jones predicted rain. J.J. Moore spoke in tongues. Elizabeth Leonard realised her betrayal. Rebecca Gibbs tended fires. Sarah Jane Douglas Moses knew she would leave. Willis Bond gave libations. Samuel Booth wanted more. Emma Stark laughed to tears. Samuel Ramsay who usually worked feverishly fell asleep. Pricilla Stewart gathered shells for no reason. Nancy Alexander tended to children. Samuel Ringo listened to birdsongs. Nathan Pointer resurrected himself. Fortune Richard scanned the horizon. Sarah Lester dreamed in music. Mifflin Wistar Gibbs’ bones ached. Mary Lowe Barnswell knew ecstasy. Stephen Whitley folded the surface. Cornelius Charity discerned a truth.
Teshome H. Gabriel, “Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics.” Questions of Third Cinema. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds.) British Film Institute Publishing, London 1991
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, The Noonday Press, New York 1993.
Stuart Hall,“Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Jonathan Rutherford (Ed.). Lawrence & Wishart, London 1990
Homi K. Bhabha, “Day by Day… with Frantz Fanon.” The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Alan Read (Ed.) Bay Press, Seattle 1996
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In the presence of absence – My response to re-presentations of an Emancipation Day Picnic.
Andrea Fatona
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore like power . Susan Sontag
Background
Over the past twenty-five years, Black-Canadian artists such as Stella Fakiyesi, Melinda Mollineaux, Michael Chambers, Buseje Bailey, have used the medium of photography to re-present, re-imagine and re-inscribe the black body into the public sphere and the cultural imaginary of Canada because there are few images that circulate within the Canadian culturescape. The interventions of these artists have served to disrupt dominant notions about what types of bodies produce visual culture in Canada, and have also sparked discussions about the making of Black-Canadian identities as they emerge and re-emerge out of conditions of colonialism and diasporic movement. The artworks produced by these artists and the discussions the works engendered centred on the invisibility of the black body within Canadian cultural discourse. Mollineaux’s work is of particular interest because it ventures beyond illuminating the effects of racism on Black people and presents multi-tonal articulations of Black subjectivities.
Mollineaux juxtaposes present day photographs of the landscape of Cadboro Bay – a site on Vancouver Island where Black folks held Emancipation Day picnics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century- with poetic texts of her imaginings of ‘mundane moments’ or ‘everyday experiences’ of individuals at a picnic. The texts of these imagined conversations were painstakingly etched onto the walls of the gallery in graphite. Mollineaux developed her semi-fictional narrative based on sketchy records collected through her archival research about Black-Canadian communities on Vancouver Island.
Emancipation Day celebrations are held by Black people around the world on August 1 of each year since 1834 to commemorate the official ending of slavery in all British territories, including Canada, on July 31, 1833. The colonial project of settlement and expansion, its institution of slavery, and technologies of racism, very much depended on violence and the subordination of the bodies of Black people so the day of freedom and personhood is a much celebrated and revered one in places where there are significant numbers of Black people. Many of the blacks who settled in BC came from the free state of California in the 1800s. In a sense the picnics were a remembrance across time and space. The significance of Mollineaux’s pin-hole photography and meaning-making process would be lost without an understanding of the impact of slavery and emancipation on both Blacks and whites. The Cadboro Bay photographs emerge out a specific colonial history that constitutes and is constitutive of the Black body and the landscape they (re) present. The photographs evoke distinct yet connected moments in time, place, and history – slavery, emancipation, the present, and the future.
Experiencing Cadboro Bay
My initial response to these photographs and the absence they presented was a visceral one. My experience was somewhat hallucinatory and I felt as if the focal point of each photograph pulled me into its vortex and demanded that I hold my attention within undulating depths of fields. Ironically, the longer I stayed in the presence of the images, the more the soft edges of the photographs became easier to bring into a comfortable focus. I experienced a movement between space and times. I heard multiple conversations but the faces of the speakers remained out of sight. The audible narratives running alongside the images as text provided me with other possibilities for imagining Blackness within the Canadian context.
For me, the text coupled with the pinhole images, are suggestive of an-other world, as well as, the fragile or dispensable space that black bodies and narratives currently occupy in this country. The photographs in the Cadboro Bay series, much like the official narratives of Canada, are almost devoid of bodies or material evidence of blackness. Mollineaux’s insistence on visually leaving the black body out of the frame closed the shutter on any attempt to obj
ectify the black body through the gaze. Instead, Mollineaux presented the viewer with the speaking Black subjects and demanded that we as viewers stand and bear witness to Black subjectivity. In a sense, Mollineaux demanded that as viewers we replicate part of her performance and stand in a place of blackness.
In the absence of historical visual evidence of bodies on the beach, Mollineaux’s photographs and text stand in for or simulates what she imagined existed in that space and place. On first look, the images evoke questions as to who, what, or where the referent is. Mollineaux provided links to the referent in positioning the textual narrative alongside the images. The interplay between the images and text created an in-between seemed space in which the viewer experienced the intertwining of two systems of representation – one where the referent is absent and the other in which the subject speaks.
Mollineaux’s construction of the place and space of Cadboro Bay – based primarily in her imaginary and perhaps nostalgia – illuminates these ideas as constructs that are contestable and unstable with regard to their meanings. The Cadboro Bay photographs highlight a tension between desires to be reflected as autonomous beings fixed through and in history and new possibilities of black self-narration and re-narration brought about because of the lack of visual reflections of the Black self in the Canadian imaginary.
The photographs suture and invert the visible and the invisible by cementing the oral with the image. Together with the text, these photographs present new ways of projecting blackness into the external world, but more importantly, they (re) present a geographically specific black Canadian performance of shared identities on which new myths can be reproduced. Mollineaux’s images rectify a dissonance experienced by many Black people in relation to a presence in Canada. The work illuminates a traumatic past and celebrates the now through a performative commemoration of the forgotten place of Cadboro Bay. It also reminds us that the collective identity of the past and the present that Cadboro Bay (re) presents is based on complex identifications that are forged within the construct and operationalization of race. The bottom line is – Mollineaux resists explicitly placing the Black body within the frame; instead, she productively engages with absence and provides sonic resonances of performances of Blackness.
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