Alberta Whittle

between a whisper and a cry, 2019

In between a whisper and a cry, Whittle links together sonic cosmologies within Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s research on tidalectics (the notion of developing an oceanic worldview and a different way of relating to the ocean) and Professor Christina Sharpe’s seminal book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Featuring a collage of archival and filmed footage, Whittle’s work summons the ever-present ghosts of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the climate crisis as she maps the entangled histories of empire and environmental catastrophe across bodies and borders. Whether in drought or flood, water is revealed as a site to absorb, sink, and hold these hauntings. In its narrative and presentation, the work undertakes Sharpe’s description of anti-Blackness as a kind of “weather”—an almost atmospheric phenomenon—that oscillates and submerges, washing over like waves. Interrogating the memories and life that these waters hold, between a whisper and a cry asks audiences to consider their own bodies and their relationship to the ongoing effects of colonialism and slavery still rippling outwards. For Whittle, this work is an offering, an act towards repair, an insistence on survival, and an invitation to release.

Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow.