Of Ghostly Silences and Constant Yearnings

"In Of Ghostly Silences and Constant Yearnings, I make inquiries into the ideas of place and belonging in post colonial Africa. In my investigation, I make time travels through historical photographs and maps, reappropriating them here into a series of serigraphs and tapestries.
Efforts to reconfigure this past through these historical materials present many challenges coming from their integrity and the violent nature in which they were of ten initially constituted. Infinite latencies of repressed narratives that lie against the grain present a continued urgency in the work of mining these histories. In the process, the language of the ghostly has slowly revealed itself to me. 'There exists no unified representation of the postcolonial. Any turn we make towards aesthetics will inevitably return to a language of the ghostly. A language that defines that incapacity to name the disturbance of an arrested gaze' (T. J. Demos, The Politics and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art). I continue to lean into the aesthetic of a haunt to activate agency, opacity and the fantastic.
More than anything, these gestures are not attempts to heal these histories but an investigation on how they continue to haunt the present. 'Haunting does not hope to change people's perception nor does it hope for reconciliation, haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop' (Eve Tuck & C. Ree, Handbook of Auto-ethnography).
It is with this haunting that I re-enter the archive."
Jess Atieno