Loved Seeds

An exhibition, performance and short film using poetry, projected animation and clay, 2023

Funded by Look Again X We Are Here Scotland

Performed for Rise Up! Festival

EXHIBITION                                                                                                  

Loved Seeds timetravels to the lives of an enslaved family in 1832 Jamaica. They are connected to Aberdeen’s Powis Gate, Powis House (Community Centre) and Jamaica Street, through their ‘owner’ who ‘never wanted for narrators’ (Frederick Douglass).
Eldin & Love’s first collaboration focused on the mother, Quasheba.  She and her nine children continued to haunt them so their family tree was pieced together from original registries (listing no more than name, age, sometimes mother’s name and whether African or Creole). This family tree then became Loved Seeds.

Noon Salah Eldin’s poem: I named her Maryam celebrates generations, motherhood.
Skin speaks of resilience, the healing power of water. We imagine that the children swam in the Hope river on the estate.

Helen Love’s nine press moulded ceramic portraits descend along the wall together with prints installation, sound and film.

PERFORMANCE Saturday 6th May ‘23 – 2pm 15 mins

Loved Seeds performance was timed to clash with coronation day to emphasize the anti-colonial message. We wore our own Lotus Crowns in an echo of the approaching child in Noon’s poem.

To begin, Helen Love’s animated zoom projection takes you timetravelling, sugar rush to sussurus (Tunnocks teacake wrapper to whispering palms). This leads into Noon Salah Eldin’s poem, ‘I Named Her Maryam’. Humming a Sudanese lullaby, they work together, kneeling to press clay into carved plaster to form each childs face. Wearing lotus crowns like priestesses or midwives, they present the faces then hand them up on a driftwood tree. Finally Noon gives a reading of the powerful ‘Skin’.

Teaching Noon to pressmould paperclay; the making becoming part of our performance and recording the rehearsal seemed important. Also important were: the enjoyment of hands rubbing the sticky clay; the rhythm of the work; making the faces; creating a family tree to honour an enslaved family; lifting their existence off a page of names and into our present consciousness.

ELDIN&LOVE PERFORM LOVED SEEDS, FILM

This is a film about the making of a live performance.

Filmed at Look Again Project Space basement and Loch of Skene

COLLABORATORS:

Yousra Elsadig of Boutique de Nana, modesty fashion designer, made the Lotus Crowns

Nic Green, performance artist, cast an outside eye on the performance

Sara Stroud, filmmaker, contributed footage from the rehearsal

Jenny Brown of Aberdeen City Council’s Treasure Hub let us see artefacts for research

Neil Curtis, Emma Raymond and Richard Anderson, curators and historians at Aberdeen University, shared the registries of enslaved people at Castile Fort Pen

INSPIRATION:

Zakiya McKenzie, writer, on the testimony of Ms Tansy and the goddess Jamacaru in Testimonies on the History of Jamaica Vol. 1

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer, on the capricious separation of enslaved families and their supernatural powers in The Water Dancer

REMAKE THE WORLD!

“Sir Geoff Palmer nails this: slavery was/is a crime against humanity. It affected not only Africans and indigenous people; descendants – its victims – but everything; everybody. Reparations – monetary – are incalculable. Real reparation involves re-making the world.” Bonnie Greer on Twitter

Noon: It’s such a great honour to once again work as part of the artistic duo Eldin&Love around issues close to our hearts, using art as a form of activism…..we will be honouring those before us by giving them voice and telling their stories. As BPoC this commission is important to me as I am trying to set an example to the younger generations that’s it’s possible to take part in the art scene and make your voice and Art heard in Scotland