Image: Robert Divers HerrickArtist Jota Mombaça presents Ghost 25: if you can’t be free. The St. Lawrence River has been a place of interaction for a vast array of bodies: those of the St. Lawrence Iroquois, the Wendat, the Innu and other nations who sailed through the territory; those of the French, then the English, bringing with them colonization; those of slaves brought from Guinea or Louisiana. Several centuries later, in one of its tributaries – the Rivière du Sud – Jota Mombaça also immersed his tissues, his “water bodies”. In so doing, he explores what he describes as the “radicality of engulfment”. Marked by water and the living beings that inhabit it, the textile bears witness to a freedom – that of the currents – in opposition to the violence of colonization, the slave trade, globalization and industrial production. If the work resonates intrinsically with the place where it was formed, it also defies the idea of a restricted locality.
Creating a closed enclosure, the fabrics evoke both political confinement – at a time of tightening government strategies – and architectural confinement – the work being set in a city characterized by its ramparts. Like a ghost ship, the textiles also leave us with the impression of something haunted, as traces of past performances are inscribed on them.