Interview
Adelaide Damoah talks to Unit about her investigations into colonial and ecological histories through her hybrid series Betwixt and Between Worlds, involving performances as the half-spider Arachne and the series of cyanotypes featured in the gallery’s exhibition in Venice (In Praise of Black Errantry, 17 April – 29 June 2024) that dramatically include gun metal and human skin among their materials.
Unit: It is a pleasure to talk to you Adelaide, and also to have your work included in our group exhibition In Praise of Black Errantry alongside the 2024 Biennale in Venice. What did you think of the show?
Adelaide Damoah: It’s a stellar group. I’m so excited to be showing alongside, I mean, Basquiat for crying out loud, and Turner Prize nominee Claudette [Johnson]. Also Phoebe Boswell is a good friend of mine and this is probably my third time showing with her. I’m very happy to be amongst that group, however I’m gutted that I didn’t get to go! I had a performance that I had to prepare for.
U: That performance was Healing Dislocated Cultures at 1957 Gallery, the second iteration of your Arachne Chronicles. How did that series originate?
AD: Exactly. To try to give you the short version, last year Péjú Oshin, a curator at Gagosian, approached me to be part of her Rites of Passage exhibition. The Betwixt and Between Worlds series now in Venice was made for that exhibition, and in those conversations Péjú asked me to create a performance in relation to the series, which mainly concerned colonialism and ecology.
I had been exploring colonialism since around 2015. I went to Ghana to see my mum and found an old photograph of my great-grandmother, whose name was Ama, from 1920, when as I’m sure you’re aware Ghana was under British colonial rule. As a child of the diaspora, born in the UK to Ghanaian parents, I had an awareness of what that meant through discussions with my parents and my own reading, but I only thought about it from an academic perspective. So seeing such a striking photo made me think about things much more personally. I got really obsessed with the image and started using it over and over again in various different artworks, probably most notably The Rebirth of Ama (2018) where I repeated her image in a giant 4 x 3 metre work.
My research into colonialism turned into another performance called Into the Mind of the Coloniser (2019), based on colonial texts I’d found while collecting books, stamps, maps and anything relating to the British Empire and colonial history. I’d search on eBay and whatever I could afford to buy I’d snap up and index in the studio.
Some of the colonial texts I discovered went all the way back to the 17th century, written from the perspective of people who were actively involved in the colonial project. For example, administrators who had written instruction manuals on how to colonise people, how to manage the different structures to keep the “natives” in their place, and how to civilise them. I found this fascinating because I hadn’t read any history books that delved into that side of things from those very personal narratives.
U: What was the development from that performance to the Arachne Chronicles?
AD: For the Betwixt and Between Worlds performance I had this weird idea of bursting out of a cocoon and telling stories relating to the themes in the work, but nothing was really clicking. However, a friend and academic Stephen Baycroft, who has developed into a close co-mentor, one day came to my house and said he had had a dream I needed to hear.
In the dream he was in a cave and I was Arachne (from the Greek myth) on a pulsating golden web and audience members were crowding around the edge of the cave, listening to her tell stories. Spectres from the past (referencing specific writers including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Donna J. Harraway and Homi K. Bhabha) told tales about colonial expansion and its devastating impact on the earth, and how the consequences of capitalism and colonialism are weaved together and will completely destroy us if we don’t do something.
I am a massive arachnophobe, so when he was telling me this, I jumped out of my chair. I really did not like the idea of embodying a character who was a spider, it made my whole body shiver.
Then I also had a daydream, like a waking dream, I suppose precipitated by Stephen’s. In mine, I was Arachne but a therianthrope – half-human, half-spider – with long afro hair growing from my back and arms. Arachne was caring for a hybrid creature – a giant arachnid with a human scalp for a body and afro hair sprouting from it woven with thread to create the leg-like projections of the creature. The hair style is very important to me traditionally and mirrors the way my mum looked after mine and my sisters’ hair when we were children.
U: This idea of hybridity is a constant theme in your work; it must have triggered a wave of inspiration?
AD: Exactly, and the reason why I was thinking about hybridity in Betwixt and Between Worlds was through discussions about the writing of Donna J Haraway and her use of natural-cultural hybrids to think about what’s going on ecologically and to imagine a better future. If you’re a hybrid, you’re a part of nature. Somehow humans have come to think that we are these exceptional beings, but if you are a hybrid you don’t have any choice but to care for the world that you’re a part of. So the character of Arachne-Damoah is a hybrid with both synthetic and human hair, straddling both worlds.
U: The first performance at Gagosian was called Arachne: Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures – what was that in reference to?
AD: In my imagination I was rebirthing my future ancestors. Instead of thinking about time in a linear way like in the Western world, many other cultures think about time as this cyclical thing.
Genetically speaking, my great-grandmother is still a part of me, and so wherever children or progeny come in future, they’re still connected to her and that past. Also, I was thinking of the concept of Sankofa which is a Ghanaian philosophy relating to understanding the past so that you do not repeat the same mistakes in the present.
The idea of Arachne: Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures was that the performance involved spectres from the past who were speaking about the terrible things that have happened and their consequences, and then there were spectres from the future talking about potential solutions, giving us hints as to how we can change and evolve. Arachne’s hybrid nature allows her to weave all of that together.
U: Your practice has its own hybrid nature, split between painting and performance – could you talk a bit more about how you developed the visual side of the Betwixt and Between Worlds series, especially using the imagery of your great grandmother again?
AD: They are a cyanotype series. This is immediately interesting to me as the cyanotype is a technique discovered in colonial times: in fact, Anna Atkins, who is known as the pioneer of cyanotypes, was using the process to document types of flora in in Jamaica while her husband, John Pelly Atkins was a ‘West India Merchant’ who was deeply involved in the colonial trade system and his father was an owner of several slave plantations in Jamaica.
The actual process, however, is cool as there’s a certain unpredictability involved. Sometimes they can come up faded, which gives a more ghostly appearance, an important result for me. Then marrying that with other techniques like layering ink in a spontaneous way, pouring and tilting them, it comes out beautifully.
At the same time there is a layering of imagery, including the image of my great grandmother Ama with colonial texts such as the newspaper headline “The Scramble for Africa” from an 1884 (just before the 1884 Berlin convention) Times newspaper article which discussed the ‘scramble’ as if there weren’t already human beings living there. In some of the works there is text from an announcement from the British Embassy in New York in 1956, announcing Ghana’s coming independence in 1957 and what the new flag and coat of arms would look like. All these different things placed in the same picture plane as my ancestors and myself create what you could call a palimpsest. Positioned alongside five generations of my ancestors there’s a temporal and spatial disruption because I added colonial maps as I was thinking about the displacement of the diaspora around the world throughout time. Layering in text so you cannot ignore that this all relates to colonial history feeds all sorts of complexities, and creates an artwork that in and of itself is a hybrid thing.
U: Is it correct that the artworks incorporate some interesting materials, such as pigments made from gun metal and even human skin? Where do you begin to find these materials?
AD: Absolutely! Well, the finding of those materials was just by chance. A lot of the things that end up happening in my work are by chance. I was introduced to a professor called Paul Hayward at UCL in 2019. I was speaking to him because I was doing performances covering my skin with paint and he was connected to a lab developing these art materials. In those conversations, he said he happened to be working with Manchester police collecting guns from gangs there, and the lab smelted the guns to create a pigment for artists to use however they wanted. It’s so beautiful. When you look at it, it’s this deep brown colour with all these sparkly bits, and I thought of course I’m going to use it.
And then he told me he had been collecting the dead skin from his feet…! But something else he said made me move past my initial feeling of disgust. He thought it could be interesting to see how a Black artist such as myself, who was exploring colonial themes and a child of the diaspora, would interact with this paint that was from the discarded skin of a White, middle-aged, middle-class professor, who if he had been born in a different time could have been involved in colonial operations. When he said that immediately I said, “Okay, give it to me!”
U: And how did that make you feel?
AD: Excited! Initially I didn’t know how I was going to use it. But with Betwixt and Between Worlds, it just clicked. I combined the skin paint, because it’s colourless, with the mixtures I was using to play with the cyanotypes. I was thinking not only of my matrilineal ancestors embedded in the work, but also this man and his ancestors – his DNA is literally in the work, right? As a Black artist, I was thinking it’s not only Black bodies who carry these histories, it’s actually in all of us. So what does that mean? What does it mean that when you’re looking at this work, you have no choice but to look through the skin of this man? There are so many ways that this work is a hybrid. Intellectually, when you break it down, it’s incredibly potent.
U: How important is it for you to show these works in Venice during the Biennale?
AD: People often look at it like the Olympics of the art world, right? An opportunity for different nations to showcase their best artists who represent the things that they want the world to understand about them. I think it’s quite an interesting way of getting the world to engage with, and hopefully empathise with, whatever it is that a particular nation wants the world to think about them. A way of asserting their cultural identity, a sort of soft power.
U: What’s coming up next for you and Arachne?
AD: There are more Chronicles to come. I’m thinking about collaborating with AI for Arachne to become a digitised being that evolves in the ether to become something else. I can then do performances in response to what she becomes.
The series has also birthed a book which I just finalised together with Stephen Baycroft. It’s called Rites of Passage, Cultural and Natural-Cultural Hybridity and Arachne: Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures. I’ve written the origin story of Arachne in there and Stephen has written the various essays. It’s not a big book, but it’s quite dense!
U: Adelaide, thank you!
