Of & By: Louis Henderson

Of & By: Louis Henderson
Thursday May 14
7:30pm

Louis Henderson will be screening his 2018 film 'Evidence of things unseen but heard' (20mins). Following the screening he will be in conversation with Jonathan P. Watts.

Commissioned by Natasha Ginwala and IFA gallery Berlin for the exhibition "Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future."
Evidence of things unseen but heard (2018) is the first chapter in a series of audiovisual collages conducted as an archaeological survey into the music scene of the city of Bristol, specifically plotting: “The Bristol Sound”. The beginning is the neighbourhood of St. Paul’s in Bristol, or perhaps it is the sugar plantations of the Caribbean that led to the wealth of Bristol through decades of slave trade, or somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which operates as the connecting volume between these geographies and times. The predominately Caribbean community of St. Paul’s protested in April 1980 against the brutality of the police forces in particular and against the racist institutions and conditions of economic oppression of Margaret Thatcher’s government more broadly. The centuries of colonial violence echo back, entangled with the nights of unrest resulting from a complex security apparatus activated through computerised police surveillance and newly implemented Stop and Search laws across Bristol, and other parts of England.
This audiovisual collage argues that such measures of social control used against the St. Paul’s community were first developed on the slave plantation in the Caribbean. Rippling and reverberating through time are the sonic acts that unleashed rhythms of defiance, against the Police/Plantation state. The Reggae Sound System is imagined as an alternative public sphere with Dub as its technological invention, creating as Fred Moten has described, the “Sound [that] gives us back the visuality that ocularcentrism had repressed.”

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Since 2017, Henderson has been working within the artist group The Living and the Dead Ensemble. Based between Haiti and France, they focus on theatre, song, slam, poetry and cinema, their first feature film Ouvertures was awarded a FIPRESCI special mention at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival 2020.

His work has been shown in various international film festivals, art museums and biennials and is distributed by LUX, Video Data Bank and Phantom, and produced by Spectre. He lives and works in Paris and Berlin.

This is an Of & By event, a series of artist talks, screenings and discussions organised by the contemporary art critic Jonathan P. Watts.