For New Work: Making East London, Carrie Mae Weems created The Long Goodbye, a new film presented in the Film Room of the Why We Make galleries at V&A East Museum.
Combining archival footage, music, dance, portraiture, and performance, The Long Goodbye traces how bodies of water, from their sweeping currents to soft tides, have shaped us, enabling transatlantic migration and continuing to impact communities in east London and beyond. The work explores the creation of new identities and artistic forms by the immigrants who have relocated across oceans, both voluntarily and by force. Weems celebrates the cultural diversity that connects and underpins the foundations of contemporary cities. Transcending fear and adversity, water and networks of migration are the fuel of global creativity.
In this interview, Weems reflects on the questions of power, memory and representation that have shaped her practice, and discusses the personal experiences, research and conversations, including her engagement with the V&A East Youth Collective, that informed the creation of The Long Goodbye.
Could you describe your practice and the questions or ideas that guide your work?
I am a visual artist who works primarily with photography and video, and sometimes with performance and installation. I value installation to work out ideas and concepts and photography for its immediacy and descriptive quality. Video allows me to work with time and to bring together language, text, music and image in ways that I deeply enjoy.
No matter the form, I feel that I have always been dealing with the same fundamental questions: who holds power, how power operates, and how privilege shapes the lives of those who have been offered very little. The question of how to manage and challenge power has been central to both my life and my work.
I am also interested in the power of voice: how it can be used to empower people who have been disenfranchised, and those who have been made to feel that they have lost everything.
Were there particular moments, or experiences that shaped your approach?
Necessity. Necessity shapes my practice, both for myself as a person, as a creative, and as somebody engaged with the world and with making in the world.
I saw that there is a lack of visceral representation around the bodies, the people and the ideas that I thought were important. There was a space for African Americans, a space for us, that needed to be filled. There was a story to be told that hadn’t been told. There was a look, an aesthetic, a range and a set of possibilities and conditions that needed to be explored differently, in a much more complicated and dynamic way.
Very early on, I was aware of cultural stereotypes and how those stereotypes had affected Black people and women, for the most part. That needed to be addressed. So, almost from the very first moment, I set about trying to find ways to break through and to develop another kind of path, one that would allow us to see ourselves in a much more comprehensive, complex and nuanced way.
As a photographer, of course, Roy DeCarava was perhaps one of my greatest influences. His The Sweet Flypaper of Life has always been near me, and I refer to that work often. I refer to him often.
The Kamoinge Workshop, which Roy DeCarava, Beuford Smith, Frank Stewart, Shawn Walker and Ming Smith were part of, was very, very influential in my initial thinking. Alain Locke and the work he did around the New Negro, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the work he continues to do, have also been very informative. Robert Frank and Dorothea Lange have been tremendous influences on the work as well.
How would you describe your commission for V&A East Museum?
This has been such a complicated project, and I’ve been so excited by it in so many ways.
If I think about the source of the energy that I’m interested in, my fundamental concern is how to reflect on and navigate the afterlife of slavery, the ghosts of slavery. How do we nonetheless negotiate these ideas around our intrinsic, important humanity?
In order to do that, you have to have an extraordinary level of compassion. I think that at the core of the work is compassion, love and vulnerability, as it looks at the complexity of the conditions that Black and brown people have been placed in for centuries. How do we gather that humanity and present it?
This commission was a way of allowing me to explore and think about the transatlantic in another kind of way. What does it mean to come across all of these oceans and to land in these territories of empire, whether that empire was in Britain, the United States or Europe? What does this mean?
Ultimately, it means that the waters have been troubled. And yet, the thing that is important to me is not only to look at the troubled water, but to consider what springs from it.
What springs from that troubled water is an extraordinary amount of ingenuity and possibility. Black and brown people have emerged and, using languages that were not meant for them, developed entirely new ways of communicating through music, dance, film and photography. We are restaging ourselves and staging ourselves in another way, one that incorporates ideas about love, compassion, possibility, hope and the future.
The V&A East project has given me the possibility to explore this in a very unique way. I think it has set me up for a great deal of work ahead. It won’t end here. I feel as though you’ve allowed me to enter a very special door of consideration: looking at the bodies of water that shape us, where we come from, how we migrate, how we immigrate and what that experience means for us.
And it’s a nuanced practice. I’m hoping that it’s not too much on the nose, but rather that it’s subtle and important.
What was your starting point for developing this series of work?
This idea of migration, and what it means to migrate, and what it means to leave.
To leave home, to seek another home, to build anew, to begin again. How is that possible? And all of the questions that come along with that. All of us, in one way or another, migrate.
Leaving home, leaving my family, leaving my sisters, my brothers, my mother, my father and everything that I knew in order to do something else in the world. And so I use myself, in some ways, as a kind of barometer for understanding the intensity of what it means to leave and to go abroad, or to go to another country and make a way in that place.
And I talk to the people around me. I talk to lots of immigrants. Every taxi I get into, I end up having a conversation with the driver, who is often from another country, whether it’s Africa, India, Bangladesh or Peru.
And what does it mean for them to be in a place like New York, trying to figure out how to make it work, working from nine in the morning until ten at night, rarely seeing their families? Sometimes seeing them once or twice here and there, and sometimes not seeing them for years. What does that mean?
They do it out of great love and great desperation. And so there is no way that you can talk about the immigrant experience without talking about love. It’s impossible. It’s impossible.
Love seems to be embedded in these stories, but is often missing from the way migration is narrated. How do you think about that?
Well, you know, one of the most difficult things that we do is to confront ourselves. One of the wonderful things that James Baldwin talked about is that the artist is here in order to illuminate those things that we most fear, the things that we are most ashamed of.
Because when we talk about love in that way, it can sound almost sentimental. But it’s not a romance. It is a struggle. And out of that comes something that is so profound.
I am no longer ashamed to face these difficult issues, both for myself and for my public. We have to bring an audience into a new awareness of who we are and what we are as human beings on the planet, and how we band together in order to achieve something greater.
We’re still babies. We’re still crawling on our knees, trying to understand what our humanity is. We have not yet fully erected ourselves.
What was your process for researching and making the work for this commission?
I spent the first year really thinking that I wanted to bring together many different kinds of materials: suitcases and boxes and books and globes, a whole staging of work. That simply wasn’t possible, given some of the limitations we had to deal with and the way the building would be used. But the thinking started there.
I had wonderful meetings with the V&A East Youth Collective, and it was really important to hear their voices, and to share ideas. Looking at some of their wonderful photographs informed me in an important way, particularly around their notions of migration and immigration, what it meant for them and, in some cases, what it meant for their parents. I had not really thought so much, for instance, about Irish immigrants to the UK. That was something important that I might not have considered. The same was true of people who had come from Ukraine or Poland. The migration experience is complex. So being with the students was really important, alongside doing my own reading and thinking.
And then, finally, I began to think about what it means to leave home and the importance of returning home, whether you return physically or return through letters, correspondence and ways of sending word home that you are safe.
I started thinking about correspondence. How do we correspond with the people we left behind? Do we do it through recordings? Through voicemail? Through earlier forms? Some of the greatest letters ever written were letters from migrants and immigrants sending money and words back home.
So I used that. I did some reading, and then I began to play with those ideas myself: writing, recording, working with my collaborators, developing the photographs and using some abstract forms.
There is a group called the Polar Bear Club, where every morning over the course of the summer, hundreds of primarily Black people gather to bathe and to heal. They begin with songs about wading in the water and climbing Jacob’s Ladder. It is a way for the community to gather itself together in a special place every year, as a site of remembrance and healing around the possibility of where we have been and where we would like to go.
I was really struck by it. and it surprised me. It gave me not only a different understanding of very simple practices, but also an insight into the great possibility of how a community works together to heal and to reflect daily on its experience.
So that has been a great deal of the process. The research always starts with reading and thinking, calling on my own experience and my own understanding, because that is first and foremost essential, and then being in conversation with as many people as I can about their own particular experiences. From there, I begin to build and theorise the work and what the work needs to be.
My hope is that the best work is transformative, that it brings you to another level and place of understanding. So I’m trying to create a certain kind of experience, both for myself and for the audience.
How did your time in London, and especially your research into East London, inform the work?
I had a wonderful time coming to London and being there. London is an extraordinary city. But I realised at a certain moment that I’m really not from that place. It is not my world, and I couldn’t pretend that it was.
It became much more important to figure out my intersection with East London and to speak from that place, rather than to attempt to speak from the other side of it.
And so I’m much more interested in how we are common, how we are connected. In some ways, it is not so much about place. It is much more about a certain kind of condition.
That condition can be expressed through many lands, many places and many cultures. So that became one of the learning curves for me.
East London is not unlike East Harlem, East Los Angeles or East St Louis. They are people living in very similar conditions, arriving in some instances for the same reasons and experiencing very much the same thing.
The idea of echoes becomes important. There are these echoes across the diaspora, in all of its forms, that link us in a very dynamic way.
As opposed to thinking of these places as silos and as separate, I would rather think about the condition that needs to be examined. That is much more interesting to me at this point in my life and my work.
How does the present political climate shape the way you think about the work?
Particularly at this time, we are entering a very brutal period in the West. Whether in the UK or the United States, established ideas of privilege, of white privilege and white male power, are being disrupted. These things are on the block, and they are being protected in a very strong and brutal way by extraordinary forces.
Of course, there is the brutality directed against migrants in the United States. We have ICE raiding schools and churches, high schools and colleges, banning books and murdering people.
We are in a very desperate time, a very volatile time, and also a great time for great imagination. Because we will hold. We will be here.
And that is what I mean by these shared conditions. That is what I mean by the echoes.
How does this commission connect to your wider body of work? Has it helped you explore something new or pushed your practice in a different direction?
There were things that I considered around the experience of migration that I think are really important to pursue further. I’m looking forward to doing that, and I already have a few ideas in mind, projects that I want to explore more deeply around the question of movement and migration.
There is something about the UK experience around migration and immigration that I think is really important. These great nations were built through migration. People came to the UK after the war to assist England in rebuilding after the Second World War. The gates were opened, and millions of people came to assist in the rebuilding of a new London, a new England that people could look at and be proud of.
To then refuse to continue welcoming those people with open arms, or to fail to give them the credit they deserve, is not fair and it is not right. The country owes a debt of gratitude to those families who sacrificed so that the nation could endure and become what it is today.
So I am exploring this more and more deeply as I move through this project and into my next one.
What do you hope people will take away from encountering the work? Is there a particular way you hope they will engage with it?
I hope people will re-examine and think about what it meant for so many people to come to the UK after the war, as workers who assisted in rebuilding the nation.
I hope it allows people to rethink the country, and their own feelings and relationships to England and to the Black, brown and Asian people who make up that population and who have been so important to the culture.
And again, the story of love, the love and the gift that was offered to the country.
If someone were encountering your practice for the first time through this work, what would you hope they would take away?
For a long time, I asked myself this question: what is love? What is it? We use this term all the time. ‘I love you. I’m in love with you.’ What is love?
And then I had an encounter about twenty years ago with someone. It was not a sexual love, but it was love. What I realised was that every time I spoke to this person, or was in the presence of this person, I was allowed to see myself more clearly. They opened up a pathway in me that allowed me to see the breadth of myself. It is not often that happens. It is a rare occurrence that you stand in the presence of someone and you see who you are.
And it occurred to me that I am illuminated through that encounter. And that love is the deepest kind of thanks that I give to the person who has shown me most clearly who I am.
It is not abstract. It is actually very specific. It is a kind of light, a kind of glow, where in all your foibles and in all your complexity, you are able to really see who you are.
That has only happened to me maybe once or twice in my life. In the deepest way, that is what I believe love is.
And so I’m hoping that, in some way, my work shows you something about who you are and where you are now.