Too many Captain Cooks

In September 1788, captain Luke Collingwood sailed from the Guinea Coast of West Africa in an overloaded slave ship named Zong on his way to Jamaica. By 29th of November many of the slaves inside the ship had begun to die from disease and malnutrition. Captain Collingwood ordered his crew to throw 133 sick slaves overboard. He justified his decision by the law of jettison, which permits the destruction of some cargo if a ship is caught in a severe storm and is at risk of sinking. The boat wasn’t at risk of sinking, but Collingwood’s act allowed the owners of the ship to claim insurance to recover the value of the lost cargo. ^[1]

The Zong massacre remains a powerful symbol of the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade and the systemic dehumanisation it entailed. The Cameroonian political theorist Achillie Mbembe notes that the conditions of dehumanisation and exploitation historically associated with blackness during the transatlantic slavery voyages have now become the norm for marginalised humanity. Mbembe argues that the dynamics of global capitalism and neoliberalism have led to a world where exploitation and inequality are prevalent. These conditions, once primarily affecting black people due to colonialism and slavery, are now seen in  larger segments of the global population. This phenomenon is what Mbembe refers to as the “Becoming Black” of the world.^[2] This "Becoming Black" signifies a shared global condition of vulnerability and alienation. To read the slave ship is to read the trouble of today: wars, global refugee crisis, deaths in custody.

The 24th Biennale of Sydney; Ten Thousand Suns, includes many artists responding to colonial archives from the Global South. These artists are, each in their own way, telling the viewer that captivity is never complete. There is always a line of escape. There is something that disrupts colonialism and the coherence of captivity within the slave ship. Something that the captor couldn’t have anticipated. Bayo Akomolafe, the Nigerian philosopher, describes the slave ship as a wooden womb that birthed something else.^[3] It birthed music genres, languages, cuisine, carnival, religions and spiritualities.

At White Bay Power Station there are several works by Jamaican-British artist Satch Hoyt, featuring sculptures and installations accompanied by sound, as well as paintings and drawings. Hoyt’s work traces the imagined rhythms, melodies, and harmonies that enslaved Africans carried in their bodies across oceans to the Americas and the Caribbean. His work continues the long legacy of reclamation that Black people have engaged in for centuries. Such as, the Rastafari movement, which stands as a spiritual, cultural, and political force rooted in Afrocentric beliefs, Pan-Africanism, and the reclamation of Black identity, pride, and African heritage. Hoyt's practice has been dedicated to ‘un-mute’ colonial sound collections captured since the introduction of slavery. For Hoyt, the sonic opens a portal to the acoustic mappings of history—testimonies of enslavement, resistance, empowerment and liberation. According to Hoyt, the repatriation of artefacts to Africa must be coupled with the repatriation of their accompanying music, costume, and choreography—the complete chapter of the particular artefact^[4]. Hoyt uncovers layers of diasporic experience, reimagining memories of the African diaspora from the transatlantic slave voyages until the present.

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Hoyt’s Afro-sonic mapping intertwines paintings and music, with the paintings functioning as cartographic depictions of the soundscape they accompany. Ice Pick (2019) consists of a frosted Afro comb with a raised fist for a handle placed within a red velvet-lined clarinet case from the 1970s.  Accompanying the case is a pair of headphones through which a sound recording of brushing hair can be heard. The Afro comb is ubiquitous within black diasporic cultures in the Americas, Britain and the Caribbean. The earliest surviving hair combs were found in Ancient Sudan and Egypt (Kush and Kemet). In the twentieth century, the Afro comb has taken on a wider political and cultural significance, perhaps most notably in the form of the ‘black fist’ comb that references the black power salute.

Cross Rhythmic Delay (2017) is a large-scale abstract painting. In this painting Hoyt employs vibrant colours and dynamic forms. Two abstracted forms reference the African and American continents, intersected by vertical lines which act like a musical stave. Hoyt describes his paintings as Afro-sonic depictions of this continuous flow of music between Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas^[5].

Hoyt’s Afro-sonic mapping reveals that the decolonisation of land or territory is deeply intertwined with a parallel process of decolonising the 'ear.' It is through sound that culture has been preserved. Hoyt’s work creates collective spaces where the voices and embodied narratives of enslaved people circulate, resisting the erasure long demanded by the colonial project.

If Achille Mbembe suggests that the world is "Becoming Black", then we might consider how blackness could open up possibilities for new forms of expression and existence. By embracing the multiplicity and richness inherent in blackness, as Satch Hoyt does in his work, we see an emphasis on fluidity, creativity, and the potential for change. For "becoming black of the world" involves exploring the potentialities that exist outside of dominant structures and capitalist systems.