The Long Form of Us

This presentation includes a series of images, a brief statement about the overall research project, and a description of works featured as part of this series. Text and images archived here are for review, and are not intended for publication. All rights reserved. Additional information including ancestry DNA test results, further genealogical mappings, information about relatives portrayed in Archives, digitised photographs of ancestors and DNA matches, and other related materials are organised in a separate link, available upon request.

About The Long Form of Us

The Long Form of Us utilises ancestry DNA testing and genealogy to map where histories framed as disparate and distinct converge across the lineage of my family. Local in Berlin, the city where Africa was divided during the Congo Conference of 1884 - 1885, and Brussels, the capital city of the European Union, I am ritually asked questions like: “But where do you really come from?” “What are your origins?” “How many generations of your family come from the U.S.?” The word “really” suggests that a lie has been told when I locate myself as coming from Los Angeles, that I am presenting something which should be understood as absurd and impossible. Responding to these questions requires me to narrate histories of colonialism, racism, and slavery. Histories that are just as British, European and American as they are African, First Nations and Creole. Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark played pivotal roles in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, contributing to its organisation, operations and profitability. This event, which displaced an estimated twelve million African people, is the largest recorded account of human trafficking in history. In European discourse racism is often framed as an exclusively American phenomenon. Chattel slavery, segregation, and the executions of Black people by civilians and public servants, are evoked as proof of problems that have never landed on European shores, issues that are not entrenched in European histories, cultures, and power relations. Which processes have resulted in Black people being in the position of narrating these interconnected histories in the present, while also being framed as unreliable witnesses, outside of time, space, reality, and our own biographies? 

As a method of deconstructing these sociopolitical perspectives and power dynamics, I have engaged the history of my family as a focal point for examining where histories of dehumanisation and brutality coalesce across lineages, localities, and lifetimes. Zooming in and magnifying the specific details of my family allows for analyses that connect several different places, eras, and positions. Most African Americans whose recent ancestry has been concentrated in the American South for generations will have ancestors who come from various communities and cultures. Collective test results from Ancestry DNA, 23 & Me and My Heritage have matched my DNA to the following communities, cultures, regions, and nations: Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo & Western Bantu Peoples, Benin, Togo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Angola, Kenya, Jamaica, Mexico & Central America, Indigenous Americas-Mexico, England and Northwestern Europe, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Portugal, Finland, and Ashkenazi Jewish peoples. Further features of these tests have connected me to a current total of 16,976 DNA matches. Their results simultaneously confirm, contrast, and raise additional questions about my estimated ancestry.

What I understand about my family’s histories and where various strains of the past are superimposed across our story, does not unfold in a chronological timeline. Conversations and correspondence with DNA matches, a list of paternal ancestors dating back to 1837, and ritual work conducted by a Sangoma, have provided prologues, footnotes, segues, and epilogues for the stories of individual ancestors and specific family lines. As an archivist I am working with what I can trace, and what history and the present tense provide as clues and citations. The Long form of Us engages urgent dialogues centered around: historical memory and selective recollections of the past, definitions of racism that wilfully frame race outside of continuities of racial oppression, and resistance movements revolving around justice and reparations. 

Description of featured works

A Long Time Ago Far Far Away is a series of portraits made from colonial mappings of Africa. These collages address social constructs of culture, citizenship, and power immersed in continuities of racism. Ancestry DNA tests examine one percent of the one percent of our DNA that “makes us who we are”. Breaking these results down into further percentages, i.e. 49.3% Nigerian, 25.5% Sierra Leonean, etc., cultural heritage is defined through colonial constructs and borders that my African ancestors might not have recognised. Data included in these test results underscores relationships between modern science, colonial frameworks, and contemporary notions of identity.

Elements of You in The Archive is a series of collages created from images of documents related to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery in the Americas. Royal decrees, insurance policies, slave ship manifests, records of sale, production overviews, rosters of enslaved persons, wills, private letters, and interviews with formerly enslaved persons are utilised in these portraits. Additionally images of currency used as part of the trade, and exchanged for the sale of enslaved African people, are also featured in these images. Each figure floats on polypropylene sheets painted with gold, silver, or brass metallic inks.

Archetypes addresses missing or unavailable information about my distant ancestors by centering information about their descendants (my DNA matches), gleaned through online searches. Enslaved African people are positioned as subjects without talent, intelligence, desire and imagination. Crafted primarily from imagery featured in my previous collage works, the personhood and individuality denied to my ancestors is poetically engaged through African futurist renderings of their descendants. The Olympian is a portrait of my DNA match, ____________ who competed as a long jumper at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The Revolutionary’s Daughter is a portrait of my DNA match, ______________. ______’s father is ________________, a Windrush activist who helped remove slaver Edward Colston’s statue from its plinth during a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol. The Superhero is a portrait of DNA match, ____________, an actor who has appeared in Marvel’s Agents of Shield, DC’s Black Lightning, and HBO’s Watchmen.