TO BE A WITNESS
TO BE A WITNESS is a nomadic portrait journey across the women who I have collided, befriended, advised, listened, cried, danced, laughed, with me in this lifetime and beyond. It is an exploration and interrogation of our choices as women in how we create, cultivate and sustain community.
Since 2016, I have most consistently documented, preserved and archived the work and livelihoods of Writer and Director, Ebony Blanding and Muralist and Printmaker, Jasmine Nicole Williams. By making their perspectives tangible, I am providing an intimate look into their artistic practice as well as the communities that they have placed themselves in.
Ebony Blanding
Kathleen Cleaver
Lauren Knott
DaShawndra Mapp
Jasmine Nicole Williams
Dartrica Rollins
Rochelle Sodipo
Chandler Stephens
JASMINE NICOLE WILLIAMS, MURALIST & PRINTMAKER
EBONY BLANDING, WRITER & DIRECTOR
INTERVIEW WITH SAIDIYA HARTMAN
“…to recognise yourself as involved in the project of remembering what the world has chosen to forget and to write about black people with the rigour and depth commensurate with our experience. It is a very feminised labour of trying to express and to hold this collective affect of black folks; to witness and not to pretend that things aren’t bad, that we aren’t in this seemingly interminable struggle, and that we have not been living this dispossession so long. I had that desire when I wrote my first poem as a middle-schooler. I wanted to be a witness.”
