I am all the geographies that can save me

by Amandine Nana

(translated from French to English by Chrystel Oloukoi)

Torkwase Dyson, Indeterminacy #1 (Black Compositional Thought), 2022. © Torkwase Dyson.

Before the chaos
Before the fire
Before the walls fell
Before the escape
Well before the imperative to run
Lauren was ready to survive
Beyond the walls of her community
Beyond the walls of Robledo
Lauren was “learning to fly, to levitate [her]self”
“No one is teaching me.
I'm just
learning on my own,
little by little,
dream lesson by dream lesson”²
She had an intimate knowledge / But she was still gripped by the fear / Of not being able to control her direction

In Torkwase Dyson's artworks,
a line may bifurcate and take unexpected but fated paths,
two lines may intersect with a curve or avoid it
another line may suddenly join other shapes and geographies, regardless of distance.
Proximity may seep into distance.

Assembling a vocabulary of curvilinear and rectilinear shapes, Torkwase's textured and multiscalar paintings, sculptures, and drawings offer a multiplicity of possible movement strategies. Consistent with the artist's mark making ideology of “black compositional thought,”3 her artworks never deny the obstacles and oppressive systems seeking to prevent our mobility. The mere act of persisting in motion is far from anodyne for marginalized people descending from colonization and slavery and still limited in their freedom of movement that, by necessity, is unpredictable, cannot be defined: migration suffused with indeterminacy, uncertainty, and fugitivity, or the rhizomatic errantry⁴ Édouard Glissant posits in his seminal text: Poetics of Relation (1990). Similarly, the fear that inhabits Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993), regarding her capacity to choose the right direction does not prevent the security she finds in her aptitude for flight, to imagine a land(ing), an environment where she and hers would be free to determine their own futures.

In Torkwase's own formulation: “For black people, moving through a given environment comes with questions of belonging and a self-determination of visibility and semi-autonomy. This means for the systemically disenfranchised, compositional movement (ways in which the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through space) is a skill used in the service of self-emancipation within hostile geographies.”⁵ In other words, we inhabit and move through space in dialectical ways, via a series of negotiations.

Black spatial dialectics often haunt the geometric shapes Torkwase choreographs, their radical histories embodied by fugitives who experimented with freedom or, “semi-autonomy,” under slavery. A triangular or trapezoidal form invites us to recollect the nine-feet-long-seven-feet-wide garret where Harriet Jacobs (under the pseudonym Linda Brent) hid for seven years, between 1835 and 1842, before successfully escaping her master. Another shape, the square, asks us to contemplate Henry “Box” Brown and the wooden crate through which he escaped slavery by mailing himself from Richmond to Philadelphia in 1849. In relation to this gesture of abstraction, a curve suggests the hull of the ship wherein Anthony Burns hid in order to travel from Virginia to Boston, in 1854 (see Dear Henry exhibition, 2018; Bird and Lava series, 2020‐ongoing). These geometries, imbued with the energies of “Black spatial genius,”6 result from processes of abstraction. Amalgamated, they transmute into what the artist calls “hyper shapes.”7

These histories and practices of liberation cited through Torkwase's “hyper shapes” can help us interrogate the spatial dialectics we may have faced in our own lived experiences and how we overcome them through imagination. I have tender childhood memories of transitory domestic spaces that have marked my mother's and my own early migratory paths in France—in particular a studio flat in a building where the ground floor kitchen functioned as a shared space among families.

In ways similar to Octavia Butler's Lauren Olamina, it is perhaps in these narrow but communal venues that I honed my imagination the most, that I became accustomed to altering my perception of my environment and to dreaming other spaces into being. Imagination reigns in the space of memory: I have long imagined several of the geographies that I have now passed through. I have long since jotted down, charted, and invented the geographies where I once yearned to escape to, and could only get to in my sleep. And I have long imagined fleeing the geographies I have since left behind me.

Torkwase is also carefully concerned with the spatial and affective conditions of forced migration. She reminds us that migrants do not ask for palaces but for refuges ungoverned by the law of deportation and insalubrity. In too-often-constricted spaces at the onset of their migration in hostile new “host” territories, they strive to build futures. In similar ways, Lauren Olamina stretches her mind to imagine the new house that awaits her beyond Robledo, beyond the environment where she was born, but not without first crossing a barrage of gratuitous and state-enforced violence.

Indeed, there is no shortage of obstacles to our movement and our belonging, especially for the most vulnerable among us. Over the past few months, I have witnessed the multiple struggles of recently arrived people in the Paris region (Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, Collectif Combat pour l'Hébergement…), fighting to remain in oftentimes precarious housing where they are still threatened by expulsion. The perpetual movement that migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa are subjected to is not the emancipatory mobility they dreamed to find in what should have been, and is often falsely promised to be, lands of refuge. It is a precarious errantry: imposed, unlivable.

Movement, both forced and chosen, necessitates retreat spaces, where the imaginary can continue to breathe, and this is exactly what Torkwase's sculptures, namely those presented in a 2022 exhibition titled A Liquid Belonging and Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground), 2024‐2025 allow for. The geographies she summons by way of her geometries are complex micropolitical horizons, lands of honest refuge. In the presence of her work, we are invited to err, drift, but also sit, gather ourselves and learn to visualize “little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson” the creation of livable geographies, livable worlds.

Relatedly, in a 2005 open letter to the French Minister of the Interior, Glissant and fellow Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau speak about how our relational identities “still struggle to find their place in archaic Republics, and yet the imprecations they incite often express a desire to participate in an alter-Republic.” In Torkwase's drawings, paintings, and sculptures (portals), I recognize my own deep-seated desire to partake in an “alter-Republic” in order to “be able to experience the world in its diversity”—far removed from the always more “archaic” political horizons of our normative nation states. Still, to construct and inhabit an “alter-Republic,”⁸ we have to build these geometries of resistance, to move, to improvise, to produce and trace borderless territories and to continue to experiment, somehow, toward freedom. In Torkwase's compositions, in her political and romantic lines of flight, I hear an echo of Kelela singing “over the line, but it feels just right, right, right, right…”

# Space 1, Giverny, France, July 2024

On a summer evening in Giverny, while gathered with other thinking and artistic souls at the Terra Foundation for American Art's “Water Holds Memory” residency, I listened passionately to Torkwase orating her experiences of scuba diving in Cape Town, South Africa. As she spoke, I drew on my own memories of aquatic submersion to feel the sensations she was evoking. By art of narration and conversation her words fused with my own imagination and created a portal to a submarine universe where, perhaps, beings like us could find breath again.

Lately, I've been breathless—more intensely so than usual. Amidst these last few weeks, I've held more memories of inhaling and holding my breath than of deeply exhaling. My body and soul were (and still are) brutalized by months of genocides witnessed on screens, as well as the political crisis we've been facing in France following the far right's victory at the European Union elections and the French President's historically unprecedented decision to dissolve the lower house of the Parliament and hold new elections. What we call the “corps politique” (political body) was dissolving and taking us—the already fragmented social body—into the throes of this dissolution.

As Torkwase mused on in Giverny, I conjured in my mind-spirit's eye the fascination of experiencing one's body in water—light yet dense, striving not to disappear. I had a deep desire for the “liquid belonging” she expresses in her works: solidity in a liquid state, a refusal to dissipate that carries with it the memory and grief of the lives of enslaved people and refugees lost to the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean sea. I realized that perhaps I simply needed to go back to the water, to submerge myself and remember: I cannot be dissolved. We remain: “undrowned.”

# Space 2, Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast, August 2024

I ran away from Abidjan. Seized by an irrepressible desire for the reverberations of the Atlantic waves and for deambulatory errantries. Walking aimlessly is no small task in large African cities where the concept of sidewalks is reduced to a strict functional and economic medium. I found refuge in Grand-Bassam: a coastal city about a 2 hour drive from the metropolis, and, more specifically, in the Quartier-France which was the former colonial capital. (Why do we find so much charm in these colonial architectures?)

Water, in Torkwase's vision, is a dense black and dark blue matter that does not fear to face its ghosts, but yet shelters in abyss-histories, geometries of resistance and flight. Lines, curves, triangles, squares, all empty and full, all shapes born anew from formless mass. I walked along the beach of Grand-Bassam, so close to the sea, to the edge of the Atlantic and its erratic waves. I walked along this beach, entranced and yet wary of the ocean. (One cannot control inherited fears.)
I was distrustful, or perhaps more accurately, grieving the historical debt of all the bodies the waves could, at any moment, wash up ashore. He accompanied me, staying on the beach and watching me immerse myself. He did not know how to swim and, like many, feared this water. Too many stories, in the collective unconscious, of bodies swept away, drowned. (My mother told me to be careful of the currents, they carry away, they carry away, they carry away.)

I expressed these fears to him while observing the myriad littered plastic “bodies” on the sand, the toxic waste spurned, with strenuous effort, by a polluted sea. I expressed these fears to him after tripping over a plastic “body” an ocean wave had just spit out.
What if,
with the next wave, I did not trip over a plastic body but over a corpse?
What if,
next time, it was a ghost—the phantom-body of an enslaved person or a refugee?
What if,
with the next wave, I tripped over a corpse's remains, already reduced to a mineral state? (Where have all the whales washed up on the beach for the past ten years been buried?) If not a corpse, any piece of wood transports me to the ghost of a raft, its passengers, and their washed up dreams.

The scraps of rafts I stumble upon in my mind bear the specter of an architecture of survival manifested in Torkwase's 2019 exhibition 1919: Black Water. In a series of paintings and sculptures, she assembled a memorial to the dreams of borderlessness, desegregation, and re-creative mobility that animated five teenagers in the days before Chicago's “Red Summer” in 1919 as they built a raft to freely navigate Lake Michigan. This architectural gesture and carpentrystic freedom song turned to tragedy as one of the boys, Eugene Williams, drowned after a white person who, irate at the sight of Black boys in glee on their raft, launched a stone at Williams's head as if it was a bullseye after the wooden structure drifted onto the so-called “white” side of the lakefront.

The works presented at this installation (Hot Cold; Just Above and Just Below; Place, Raft, and Drift; Plantationocene; Being-Seeing-Drifting, 2019) display a quasi-aerial viewpoint. They offer perspectives on a landscape of borders and obstacles, but also on strategies of mobility and movement, on the very acts of resistance these teenagers expressed, at the cost of one of their lives. Because Torkwase paints and sculpts altars of remembrance, I wonder: Do the bits of wood embedded in the middle of Torkwase's paintings manifest that raft? Because water is such a dense black and dark blue pigmented matter in her work I wonder: How do we mourn across water? How does mourning and grief connect Lake Michigan to the Atlantic? Water, in Torkwase's vision, does not fear to face its ghosts, but yet shelters in abyss-histories, geometries of resistance and flight. Lines, curves, triangles, squares, all empty and full, all shapes born anew from formless mass.

# Space 3, Undrowning, November 2024

Returning to Lauren Olamina who, indeed,
had an intimate knowledge /
But was still gripped by the fear /
Of not being able to control her direction
calls me to revere that, after all, this is what our ancestors across the Black Atlantic have been teaching us: moving through indeterminacy is a methodology of continual adaptation and mutation. Though Lauren fears not being able to control her direction in a post-apocalyptic world full of violence and disfigured by global warming and extractivism (one that is not that far from to the one we are currently living in), her intimate knowledge guides the miraculous words that open the book: “All that you touch / You change. / All that you Change / Changes you…” This prayer of divine interdependence is undoubtedly embodied in the work of Torkwase Dyson who choreographs conspiratory learning spaces for clandestine geographies that encourage those of us still undrowned to resist / breathe / listen / live.

1. Title reference: Torkwase Dyson, I Am Everything That Will Save Me #4 (Bird and Lava), 2021, acrylic, string, and graphite on wood, 153 cm (diameter). ↩


2. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993. ↩


3. “I've set up this mode of drawing as a way to respond to the conditions in which various systemic orders of political abstraction have been used in the service of environmental exploitation… I ask myself, how do black people survive abstraction today as the scope, scale, and density of matter is changing all around us due to climate change? I begin to answer by looking at what I call black compositional thought. Abstract drawing can lend itself to the intellectual and psychological pursuit of pulling black compositional thought close. Really close, inside close. From the black-inside-black position, I stand in front of a surface with my mind in complete awareness of form as power.” —Torkwase Dyson in “Black Interiority: Notes on Architecture, Infrastructure, Environmental Justice, and Abstract Drawing,” Pelican Bomb (2017). https://pelicanbomb.com/art-review/2017/black-interiority-notes-on-architecture-infrastructure-environmental-justice-and-abstract-drawing ↩


4. Édouard Glissant describes the concept of errantry as one that is rhizomatic, meaning it has multiple roots, allowing detours and open to a horizon of connectedness and empathy. See: Heidi Bojsen, “La géographie de l'errance : à la recherche de l'intention poétique de la géographie politique,” in Autour d'Édouard Glissant : Lectures, épreuves, extensions d'une poétique de la Relation, ed. Samia Hassab-Charfi, Sonia Zlitni-Fitouri, and Loïc Céry (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux: 2008(. https://books.openedition.org/pub/47025?lang=fr#:~:text=L%27errance%2C%20nous%20dit%20Glissant,l%27Autre%20»%20 ↩


5. Torkwase Dyson, “Black Interiority: Notes on Architecture, Infrastructure, Environmental Justice, and Abstract Drawing,” Pelican Bomb (2017). ↩


6. Camille Bacon, “Rearrange: Torkwase Dyson and Black Feminist Breathing,” Momus (2022). https://momus.ca/rearrange-torkwase-dyson-and-black-feminist-breathing/ ↩


7. Torkwase Dyson, “Torkwase Dyson Reflects on Hyper Shapes,” Metropolis Magazine (2021). https://metropolismag.com/viewpoints/torkwase-dyson-noteworthy/ ↩


8. Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, “De Loin,” Open Letter to the Minister of Interior of the French Republic at the occasion of his trip to Martinique, Libération, Decembre 7, 2005.↩

Photo by William Daupin. Artwork by Tanoa Sasraku.

Amandine Nana is a writer, poet, curator, editor and researcher. She has been a full time curator at Palais de Tokyo in Paris since 2023 where she curated in 2024 “Tituba, qui pour nous protéger ?” [Tituba, who protects us ?] a transnational group show inspired by Maryse Condé worldbuilding and meditating on the relationship between grief, migration, memory and ancestrality. Trained between Paris, Dakar and New York as an art historian and urbanist with a background in Humanities (École Normale Supérieure Ulm, Sciences Po Paris, Sorbonne University, Columbia University), she specialized in African & Diaspora studies. In her multidisciplinary practice she is particularly interested in the role of storytelling, myths, archives, black geographies, and collaborative, spatial, participatory practices nurtured by critical pedagogies in the arts. As an independent writer and thinker she kept experimenting with, following the words of Edwidge Danticat the meaning as an immigrant to “create dangerously, for people who read dangerously” and to cultivate the intellectual, aesthetic and freedom tradition of black women across the Atlantic. She is also in Paris the founder of Transplantation, a non-profit socio-cultural organization, art and reading space and the EIC of Air Afrique magazine.