Upwelling: A Shared Journey Through Loss, Transformation, and Hope
Marking the Fourth Anniversary of George Floyd's Death and the Pandemic Through Acts of Remembrance and Ritual Reckoning
May: A Month of Mourning and Awakening
The month of May includes the practice of Memorial Day in the U.S., a federal holiday for mourning loss of life by military personnel, but it has also become of month of much larger memorializing as the anniversary of George Floyd’s death May 25, 2020 at the hands of police and the global reckoning with racism it sparked.
Creating a Shared Diary in Uncertain Times
Do you remember where you were in May 2020? Many of us were in the midst of early pandemic lockdowns, waiting and hoping for vaccines in a state of anxiety and confusion. At the time, sensing how long the “middle” of the pandemic would be, I had reached out to my artist friends around the world and invited them into creating a shared online diary of our days for one month to help us all endure.
From Personal Reflections to Collective Action
At the beginning of the month we posted pictures of bread rising and houseplants propagating, audio from our solo walks, dances and songs done alone or on Zoom, small daily rituals and readings. What began as a frightening and foggy time in early May, eventually overflowed into a world on fire as protests raged in the streets against police brutality, against anti-black racism, against oppression and the crushing inequities the pandemic laid bare. My friends and I kept leaving traces for each other in our shared space, sound and images of protest, moments of grief, hope, brief documents of our daily lives, raw, rough, not pretty or processed. At the end of May, as planned, we stopped posting and what was left was a register of a transformative and painful month.
Upwelling: A Ritual of Remembering
A year later, grieving pandemic losses and trying to understand how to mark George Floyd’s yahrzeit (anniversary of a death), I went back to our traces and began knitting them together into a film to share with those who had made them in May 2021.
Those friends encouraged me to make a version to share with a wider public. I reached out to two close collaborators of mine (Vita Berezina Blackburn and Taylor Olsen), both animation artists and asked if they were making anything that would weave into my work and the result was a shortfilm, Upwelling (14 min) that has since become a ritual space for me and my community to reconnect each year and reflect. I offer it to you as well for you own individual or communal reflections.
The Power of Ritual and Community
After another year of working with the material, the Wexner Center for the Arts gave me support on remastering the sound and premiered our film in their galleries during the month of May 2022. Here is a lovely summary WCA created about the project. Since then, I have committed to re-screening Upwelling each year as a ritual of remembering, a memorializing act, and an opportunity to reflect on my own process of unlearning racism, practicing anti-racist thought and action each day, and centering social justice in my work and life.
Beyond Upwelling: Resources for Reflection and Action
Revisiting this amidst the grief of the current painful protracted wars in Gaza and Ukraine and Sudan and the strange and terrible resurgence of this kind of direct and large scale violence, I find ritual newly important.
Ritual creates sacred time to reflect and be present and give attention. Rituals offer opportunities to return and return again. As I have learned from many Black dance scholars (thank you Kariamu Welsh, thank you Brenda Dixon Gottschild) repetition in an Africanist aesthetic builds on itself and creates energy rather than simply duplicating. The repeated gesture holds within it the power to transform, the repeted rhythm grounds us and moves us into communal action. And on the simplest, day to day level of habit and scheduling, there is simplicity in repetition, there is comfort and power in returning to known practices, and repetition supports commitment.
So kind friends, I offer the film to you today at this link as a free screening and shared ritual of remembering:
Watch here: Upwelling (2022) 14 minute short film, sonic poem, and animation
I hope this short film will support you in entering into your own reflections and that you take from it what you need right now to support the work at hand.
If you’d like to reflect with me in community, we can set up a time for ritual and dialog reckoning with racism any time. Or share comments with each other below, this can be a space of dialog and connection as well or share this post with others with whom you’d like to enter into ritual discourse:
Beyond Upwelling: Resources for Reflection and Action
If you'd like other ways to reflect, I often return to these words from adrienne maree brown written in 2017:
“We are in an imagination battle.
Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, radicalized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.
Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else's capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone' else's imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Here is a recent post marking the 4th anniversary of George Floyd’s death from Policing Equity and a beautiful Prayer for Transformational Change written in June 2020 and as important today.
With you in solidarity desiring transformational change,
Norah