2017
Thoughts on Lost and Loss: Tsedaye Makonnen
Story by Angela N. Carroll | Photography by Ada Pinkston (LABBODIES)
Water is life. Water is sacred; but for descendants of the African diaspora, the waters house uneasy histories. Washington DC-based performance artist, Tsedaye Makonnen, creates experiential ceremonies that reveal the intersections between African migrant experiences, gentrification and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As a child of refugees, Makonnen became obsessed with learning about the migrant experiences of her parents, extended family and friends. Her performances are sourced from their stories; and blend Ethiopian earth-centered rituals with site-specific direct actions to dismantle flat depictions of African migration.
It is difficult to visualize the immense devastation wrought from centuries of forced African exoduses. From the 16th to the late 19th century, the Transatlantic Slave Trade kidnapped and transported 25 to 35 million African men, women and children to Europe and the Americas. Makonnen’s installations and performances draw links between the traumas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and contemporary African migratory experiences. The United Nations High Commission of Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that some 4,176 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2015. An average of 11 men, women and children perish every day in the journey to Europe and the Americas from Central, North and East Africa. To date Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen are all afflicted with devastating famines, exacerbated by conflict and climate change. Thus, thousands have been displaced and forced to seek new shelter, food and means for survival.
The first time I saw Makonnen perform “Lost and Loss” (one of several pieces from a series examining black migration), was in Baltimore at a performance festival curated by art collective LABBODIES. She wore a thin white skirt and halter top. Her head was veiled; her feet were bare. She walked silently through the audience and placed clay ship-like vessels into a large circle on the gallery floor. Tse-gue Maryam Guebrou’s anthem “Homeless Wanderer” played softly in the background. Makonnen crouched in the circle and sketched a rough outline of Africa with a map of Washington DC at its center and the Mediterranean to the north of the continent. She quickly scrawled dozens of lines orienting from the Horn of Africa out towards the Mediterranean and Europe, an abstract representation of the Central Mediterranean Route, onto the floor. Makonnen uses her own body and staple Ethiopian exports to examine the ways capitalism and globalization influence contemporary migration. The ritual she conducts in “Lost and Loss” intones a walking meditation, a circular trance-like march around the clay ships and map that echoes the cyclical export, exploitation and displacement histories of African nations. At the apex of each rotation, she grabbed jars filled with Ethiopian goods and sprinkled them onto the ships. The weight of cinnamon, clove, cardamom, coffee, flowers and fresh cut grass caused some of the ships to capsize. In her final roundabout, the resource laden ships were crushed beneath her bare feet, reducing the fleet to shattered fragments and dust. After a few moments of silence, Makonnen invited the audience to gather the remnants into small cloth pouches and leave them on the floor where the ships once stood.
The power of “Lost and Loss” rests in its use of mythology and embodied knowledge to articulate the residual tensions of historical traumas on Africans. Makonnen’s body is a proxy for the unseen and unknown migrant and enslaved bodies who have been lost at sea. The ritual she performs is one that has been performed for centuries by Ethiopian women to honor the earth and predates Orthodox Coptic Christianity. Modernity and religious indoctrination has forced the ritual into obscurity and thus younger generations have forgotten it exists. Makonnen’s reactivation of the ritual inscribes the historical importance and agency of Ethiopian women in new contexts. In “Lost and Loss,” the ritual is used to both recall and destroy colonialism. The audience bears witness to the abstracted transit of bodies and literal resources outside of the continent, but also witnesses a supernatural destructive force, the fleet of exported goods crushed beneath the heel of an African woman. This silent action speaks volumes against the subtle and overt violences of globalization, conflict driven famine and migration. Makonnen’s body is an urgent archive, a mythic griot whose movements trigger a transnational, inter-dimensional omnipresence; the past and the present contract to illuminate the distinct connections between colonial histories, African bodies, African labor and capital.
“Lost and Loss” intones a walking meditation, a circular trance-like march around the clay ships and map that echoes the cyclical export, exploitation and displacement histories of African nations.
By reimagining the Transatlantic Slave Trade, neo-colonialism and globalization as unsuccessful endeavors, Makonnen invites decolonial possibilities and a new framing of migrant identity and historiography. Anti-immigrant propaganda distributed from the extreme conservative parties of America, the Netherlands, Germany and France, among others, assume that migrant populations want to take something away from their citizens. A false and deeply flawed logic of scarcity and criminality is disseminated to instill and promote national xenophobic discourses that erase the humanity and individuality of migrating populations. Makonnen’s queries impose more nuanced historical readings which implicate the West as a primary catalyst for African displacement. Africans are forced to leave their homes in pursuit of Europe or the Americas because of the conflicts reaped from western consumption, globalization and capitalism. “Lost and Loss” presents this consumption as excessive and overindulgent; many ships are drowned in the goods they attempt to extract.
“Lost and Loss” is both deeply moving and unnerving; all senses are activated and then you are left with the loss of the subject, the weighty questions and dense realities of implication. All of us, inhabitants of the so-called “First World” are implicated. All of us will drown if we continue to support the destabilization of the developing world. Assimilation is another kind of drowning. The myths Makonnen creates give voice to migrant narratives silenced by assimilation. The intersections of myth and lived experiences in Makonnen’s series on black migration offer unrelenting hope and sobering reflections. As such, the series function as anti-colonial archives and profound testimonies to the possibilities of radical imagination. U
See more of Tsedaye’s performance art here.
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Angela N. Carroll is an artist-archivist, writer, curator, and investigator of art history and culture. She regularly contributes critical essays to significant publications, including Sugarcane Magazine, Black Art in America, BmoreArt, and Hyperallergic, and also writes art exhibition catalogs for prominent institutions including Columbia University, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Rena Bransten Gallery, among others. Angela's latest project, Exploring Presence: African American Artists in the Upper South, a catalog, exhibition, and 10-short-film docuseries surveys under-recognized artists in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. She received her MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Learn more here.