The Black Beach: Moving Images between Swedish and Caribbean Shores

Lecturer
Salad Hilowle & Christian Rossipal, Yale University

Salad Hilowle (born 1986 in Mogadishu, Somalia) holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art (2020) and a BFA from Konstfack (2018) in Stockholm. Hilowle works in a variety of media, he uses a research-based approach that highlights forgotten or hidden stories throughout art history. 

Christian Rossipal (born 1991 in Stockholm, Sweden) is a filmmaker and postdoctoral fellow in Film and Media at Yale University. Prior to Yale, he held a postdoc position at the University of Cambridge and he holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University. Rossipal works at the intersection of theory and practice, often with a focus on archives and how they are (re)activated. 

Title
The Black Beach: Moving Images between Swedish and Caribbean Shores

Abstract
How can we understand life in the former Swedish Caribbean colony Saint-Barthélemy? The Black Beach is a research project that uses artistic methods to complement and challenge the juridical archive and established narratives. 
 
A new generation is discovering Sweden’s colonial past and we are in the midst of a new, critical momentum. This is partly due to larger public interest in questions of decolonization. Partly it is due to new research by historian and consultant for this project, Fredrik Thomasson, on Saint-Barthélemy. 
 
The premise of our project, The Black Beach, is that such historical research needs to be complemented with artistic research because of the nature of available historical source material, which largely consists of juridical documents that were created by the same system that enslaved people. Departing from the Swedish collections in Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence and a silent film shot on Saint-Barthélemy by Sten Nordensköld in 1952, we ask what role artistic research can play to complement conventional historiography to resist the circumscribed, racist framework of the colonial archive:

What role does imagination, speculation, and historical fiction play in knowledge production? What are the possibilities, limits, and risks of such approaches? At stake is the future direction of the artistic research field itself. We examine the questions in relation to music, theater, and silent films on Saint-Barthélemy as well as unique access to interviews with Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant who offers a theoretical framework. 

The presentation will include excerpts from films and art installations produced within the project, including new footage shot on Saint-Barthélemy and the archive in Provence. 

The Black Beach is funded by The Swedish Research Council and is hosted by The Institute for Future Studies. 

The seminar will be held in English. 

Please register if you want to participate via Zoom. 

Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies