Archiving the Void

Myth is the threshold of history - Sadiya Hartman

Archiving the Void is a video performance work that explores mythology, archives and our context in the Anthropocene to reimagine the site of the Pitch Lake in Trinidad & Tobago as a sentient, shape-shifting being. This work is rooted in the indigenous mythology and the colonial history of the Pitch Lake, with particular focus on the ways that asphalt is formed, its relationship to the oil industry and the history of extraction for the purposes of fuelling colonial expansion and building the British empire. In the indigenous myth that inspired this work, the pitch lake originates from a community’s greed which led to the swallowing up of their entire village. I am interested in this responsiveness from the land and the idea of it retaliating, correcting or adjusting it’s level of accommodation to us based on the ways that humans have chosen to engage with it.

Credits

Produced, Directed, Edited & Performed by Gesiye

Sound by Gesiye

Videography by Chibueze Crouch-Anyarogbu