New Work: The Long Goodbye by Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems’s film *The Long Goodbye* explores migration through the lens of intertwined love stories, positioning love as both a subject and a method for restoring humanity to those whose lives are often marginalized by historical accounts. The work examines the love people carry during migration and the love left behind, showing how these experiences inform the present despite often remaining unacknowledged. The film is deeply rooted in Weems’s practice of using self-portraiture and archive to intervene in historical narratives, prompting viewers to question the evidence they consume. Migration is connected to east London, where the work resonates with the area's history and mission of celebrating diverse communities. The narrative incorporates visceral testimony regarding the fear associated with migration, juxtaposed with themes of inevitable change driven by historical movements. Furthermore, the film uses the imagery of water to connect geographies, invoking the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and concepts like tidalectics to describe cycles of departure, return, and transformation.

*The Long Goodbye*, commissioned for the opening of V&A East Museum, was developed over almost three years. The film explores migration through love stories. Migration is rooted in Weems’s practice and resonates with east London. Weems used self-portraiture and archive to insert her image into historical narratives. The commission evolved in response to debates about migration in Britain and the United States. A quote references the fear of leaving: "I remember when Britian was smashed and burned and when we became a part of the Commonwealth..." The film focuses on the pain and fear experienced by those who immigrated, including those who emigrated in chains. Water is central to the film as a route of migration and a connector of cultures. The film references the Middle Passage and suggests histories of migration remain inseparable from the present. The film features reference to tidalectics, describing history through ebb and flow. The final section opens toward joy and possibility due to the inevitability of change driven by love.

The framing of migration as a narrative governed by emotional resonance—love, fear, and transformation—challenges purely historical or statistical understandings. The use of the archive, where the artist inserts her body into history, functions as an act of counter-memory against entrenched power structures that seek to silence marginalized experiences. The invocation of the ocean as a vessel moves beyond geography to suggest an ongoing, cyclical process of human existence, aligning with tidalectics rather than linear historical progression. This approach suggests that acknowledging the emotional and personal costs embedded within large-scale historical events is necessary for understanding contemporary political realities. The juxtaposition of trauma (the "great extraction," the Middle Passage) with eventual hope rooted in change suggests a specific form of resilience: the capacity to transform inherited suffering into forward momentum. The pattern observed is a move from monolithic, imposed historical narratives toward an embodied, relational history where personal experience becomes the method for uncovering buried truths. This implies that political progress is inseparable from recognizing and honoring the humanity embedded within those histories, shifting the focus from what has been officially recorded to what remains emotionally and experientially true. What further structures of power are reinforced when acknowledging these emotional flows as drivers of change?