Installation consisting of an artist's film divided into 2 parts projected onto silk, 2017
Susannah's Voice and Vocals: Annie Goliath
Composer and colllages: Black Astronaut
Narrator's Voice: Nkuli Hepburn Zikalala
Memory 1: Susannah’s Ark
“Reconfigured Remembrances, Susannah’s Ark (2017) sees protagonist Susannah awake with amnesia to find that the only thing she can remember is her name. Susannah soon discovers that she can somehow unlock her missing memories, which is contained within the molecules of her tears. She sets sail in an ark in search of her missing memories and due to her extraordinary ability – is able to also listen to the ocean’s mixed messages – accumulated over eons. Placing the past, present and future in dialogue with each other, Goliath explores environmental concerns juxtaposed against notions of consciousness and memory. To create this multifaceted video experience, the artist has appropriated archival footage of an exhibition in search of Noah’s Ark (1947) and a 1950s advertisement for Band-Aid Adhesive Bandages (a metaphor for the countless wounds inflicted during the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene), alongside original collages, her own singing, and a short extract from the film Noah. (2014)” - Sarah Holdaway (curator for the exhibition False Memories in 2020)
Memory 2: Water Storage
A microscopic image of the pollutant microbead is present throughout
Installation shot, 2017
Memory 3: Leonora
Sound Piece, 2017
Archival Voice: The British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011)
Second Voice: Annie Goliath
Sound Design: Black Astronaut
This sound piece weaves fact and fiction to continue the story of Susannah, first introduced in the film installation Reconfigured Remembrances (2017), as she docks at the Bay of Santa Apolónia in the port of Lisbon. There, Susannah hears the voice of the British-born Mexican surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) screaming that she needs to reach Mexico — the country to which Carrington fled in real life after allegedly escaping a Spanish mental asylum, following the arrest of her lover Max Ernst by the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II.
Susannah invites Leonora to board her ark, and during their voyage, Leonora shares fragments of her nostalgic memories. Yet her recollections, full of contradictions, reveal the reconstructive and unreliable nature of memory and selfhood. Through their imagined dialogue, Susannah and Leonora reflect on feminist concerns, displacement, and the fragile interconnections between memory, myth, and the environment.