Inscription, Sedimentation, and Counter-Memorialization: Contemporary Artistic Engagements with Endurance and Fracture
- Mat Keel (LSU, Yes We Cannibal) Discussant, Presenter
- Ryan C. Clarke (Tulane, Dweller), Presenter
- Dr. Thomas Stanley (George Mason University), Presenter
- Chris Taylor (Land Arts of the American West), Presenter
- Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (VCU), Presenter
This collection of critical experimental engagements with sonic, spatial, and atmospheric registers, foregrounds timely political/ontological questions about historical and temporal endurance and fracturing.
We pick up on a recent symposium at Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge which was part of the programming for a gallery show and performance by artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste whose work engages with decommissioned police sound technologies and sculptural configurations to prompt questions about the efficacy and limits of contemporary and historic systems of value and speculation as they relate to bodies, objects, and sites.
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s ongoing project There, Eyes Were Watching… investigates a Louisiana plantation-turned-bed-and-breakfast where their ancestors were enslaved. The current site is promoted as “heritage tourism,” while the artist presents their plan for a “monument by subtraction” against the site’s current status as a memorial that masks the plantation’s afterlives beneath layers of aesthetic and economic rebranding.
Ryan C. Clarke’s Carbon Capture draws from Caribbean and Black southern thought to theorize CO₂ as both ecological crisis and ontological residue – a “kindred vapor” through which genocide and ecocide coalesce, tracing violence through levees, dredging, oil spills, and the aftershocks of racial capitalism.
Chris Taylor’s sound-based and cartographic work across the Rio Grande and Salton Sea reimagines mapping as temporal portraiture, where sound and sediment archive not meaning but movement, memory, and decay.
Dr. Thomas Stanley presents Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste 2025 performance at Baton Rouge’s Brave Cave as the prototype for ritualized, collaborative art practices that confront and symbolically inter the lingering power of colonial empire. Drawing on the Garifuna beluria funerary rite and situated within a broader analysis of necropolitics, the project proposes that ritual-when fused with site-specific, globally coordinated artistic intervention-can function as a distributed form of resistance and real counter-power, to sever the hold of imperial structures on contemporary social life.
Discussant Mat Keel draws from his dissertation on dissociation and the post-plantation in the Gulf South. Engaging psychoanalytic thought and affect theory, he theorizes dissociation as an indexical but non-coherent mode of social inscription that is neither metaphoric nor necessarily related to memory.
These presentations have been curated in relation to Toussaint-Baptiste’s work. Each offers a resonant engagement with the possibility of temporal intervention and doing history otherwise. All are positioned against dominant modes of memory that enclose, symbolize, or monumentalize history, and instead directly face the persistence of racialized and ecological violence by non-linear, indexical, and dissociated forms of relation by working with sound, gesture, vibration, criticality, and refusal.