ADAMA DELPHINE FAWUNDU
Secrets, Traditions, Spoken and Unspoken Truths or Not
By Niama Safia Sandy
ADAMA DELPHINE FAWUNDU’ s work is about finding ways to connect with her kin— a group not merely confined to those who share a direct common ancestor but an expansive definition inclusive of the many who descend from the dispersed, the stolen, those for whom the violence and opportunity wrought by the sea is at once a spectre and a fact of everyday life. She seeks to trouble the water, to reconnect African-descended peoples by raking / mining the canon, the archive, the contemporary for that which connects across time and space, to situate the transformative power of benediction, memory, and tradition in the Black Diaspora.
Fawundu’ s series, Secrets, Traditions, Spoken and Unspoken Truths or Not, features the artist pictured in the embraces of her godmother( Passageways # 1) and mother( Passageways # 2)— women who have nurtured her all her life. Each woman dons garments of cotton fabric made in Sierra Leone; some by Fawundu’ s paternal grandmother and aunt, others by the hands of women who themselves were likely taught in the embrace of a woman who wanted to ensure a woman could endure. The borders of the images are also adorned in fabrics sourced from all over the African continent— hand-sewn, dyed, stamped, designed in villages all over Nigeria, Ghana, textures placed in relief through a process of scanning digitizing. In Passageways # 1, the artist listens intently as her godmother whispers into her ear, perhaps hoping for some morsel of wisdom not yet uncovered. The second image portrays Fawundu’ s head resting in her mother’ s lap, ear nestled in the folds of the fabric of her mother’ s skirt, perhaps waiting for whispers of the past for guidance. In both images perhaps the viewer is being encouraged to seek the knowledge layered into the patterns of the fabrics; the fact that the vetements themselves carry as much love and sweat equity, as they do secrets that only the cotton fibers may be able to tell the tale, and the intrepid journeys and lived experiences of the people who hold, fold, and are adorned by them. the cleanse, Fawundu’ s first foray into video, is an invocation of abundance, ritual and rhythm, rites of passage, exaltation, and a tethering of Black feminine beauty to divinity and genius. Shot at 120 frames per second, with a running time of 10:28, every movement is in high definition allowing for the reading of every gesture as doubly deliberate. For many Black women there is a cultural more against the proximity of water to one’ s hair; smiling gleefully, Fawundu wets her straightened hair with aplomb. Festooned with bolls of cotton, she bathes her hair in milk and honey, an age-old signifier of fertility and abundance. All of this under a hybridized chant-trap music peppered with the powerful prose of the 20th century’ s most prolific Black writers. It seems she intends to celebrate the return of the hair— perhaps as a metaphor for the mind— to its natural state; to a place wherein it can expand enough to make the connections between the Black Diaspora’ s cultural, critical, and conditioned forms. opposite: Adama Delphine Fawundu Passageways # 1, from the series Secrets, Traditions, Spoken and Unspoken Truths or Not, 2017 30 x 40 in.
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