Binta Diaw

uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things - Liverpool Biennial

10.06.2023 - 17.09.2023

Drawing on the artist’s interest in hidden histories and archival material, Binta Diaw’s reimagining of her installation ‘Chorus of Soil’ (2023) uses soil and seeds to map an 18th century plan of the Brooks slave ship. Between 1782 and 1804, the Brooks departed from Liverpool to the West Coast of Africa, carrying over 5000 enslaved people to plantations in the Caribbean. Reimagined here on an almost 1:1 scale, the soil and seed plan is accompanied by a new sound work incorporating the voices of local people reciting the poem ‘Zong!’ (2008) by M. NourbeSe Philip.

Together, the two elements of this ambitious installation speak to collective acts of mourning, hope, resistance, reparation, care and celebration of ancestral wisdom. The material used for the installation – soil – speaks to the potential for new life, where new buds can grow, and healing can occur. Diaw references the plantation and the worked ground but transforms the narrative, reclaiming the labour of tending to the ground and reinterpreting it as a productive, fertile space and emancipatory act.

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