Jonelle Twum’s exhibition In the wake of waiting, the sea remembers features an installation with a speculative soundscape emerging from the depths of the Black Atlantis.
Drawing on the Drexciya myth—a subaqueous world inhabited by the Black descendants of pregnant enslaved women who were cast overboard or leapt from slave ships during the Middle Passage—the work approaches the ocean as a living archive shaped by histories of rupture, survival, and transformation. Positioning the sea as both a site of Black death and Black possibility, the installation brings together myth, memory, and material presence. The soundtrack unfolds as a requiem voiced by Drexciyans— an imagined chorus addressed to Black listeners on land, in the present. Their song carries mourning and endurance, attuned to the ongoing reverberations of historical violence. The work invites an embodied mode of listening in which time is layered and non-linear, and histories remain present. By entangling the legacy of the Middle Passage with speculative myth, In the wake of waiting, the sea remembers opens a space to reflect on grief, continuity, and the potential for becoming otherwise.
Source:
roda – soft water on hard stone
roda – soft water on hard stone