Feeling Freedom: The Enchanted Art Object
by Tanya J. Matthews, MVA 2023
Feeling Freedom: The Enchanted Art Object, is an experimental film that explores the rich and dynamic space of memory and repair in the afterlife of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Inspired by Gullah Geechee folklore surrounding the Legacy of Igbo Landing and the Gullah seeking ritual, the film centers on Charleston, South Carolina, known as both the Holy City and Capital of Slavery in the United States. How do we continue to move, to feel, to love…to dream freedom when we are also holding what is heavy? How do we make meaning, make repairs and find resolution?
A spectral ethnography, this film illuminates the tensions between "absence" and "presence" that we must navigate when inheriting ancestral freedom dreams, and those mysterious sensations associated with ancestral callings. Through a series of dialogues with Gullah Geechee elder and poet, Yvette Murray, and Charleston’s first poet laureate, Marcus Amaker, this project opens a portal into their processes of repair and the crafting of selves in the African diaspora.
Running time: 23 minutes