The Sierra Leonean filmmaker’s new installation at London’s Barbican features videos with choirs performing his poems.
From somewhere deep in the dark belly of the Barbican Centre’s Curve gallery, a mysterious refrain calls you forth; on the journey towards identifying it, screens shine with bodies of water and human bodies, dancing or singing softly, alone and in groups. Responding to the sense of passage The Curve’s space invites, artist and poet Julianknxx’s new commission “Chorus in Rememory of Flight” is a transporting, mesmeric installation. He conceives of the space as “a place of encounter”, he says, with Europe’s past, present and the possibility in its future.
The commission features three multichannel film pieces by Julianknxx — the moniker adopted by Julian Knox — made over a year in seven European port cities (Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp, London, Marseille, Barcelona and Lisbon), where he collected interviews and collaborated with black choirs. The films act as conduits for his poems, his collaborators recast as characters and their stories intertwined into a rising united rhythm that conveys, as images of water play underneath, the feeling of a groundswell. “They’re not like a history lesson,” as he puts it.
History is something he believes you can take control of: he adopted the moniker Julianknxx to shift focus from the history carried in his name, a lineage imposed by white slavers. “I see it as a reclamation of my future identity.”
Julianknxx was nine when Revolutionary United Front and Armed Forces Revolutionary Council rebels arrived in his home city, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. When I ask about his memories of that time, during the country’s 11-year civil war, he pauses. “I won’t go too deep into it. As a kid, I don’t think you comprehend what was going on at all, but all I know is I never met that kind of fear in my life ever.” Fifty thousand people died during the war. Julianknxx and family members fled to Gambia and, five years later, came to the UK.
He is still dealing with his experience of the war. “It formed my idea of what life is — you really don’t know what tomorrow holds — that lives in my head. Tomorrow is not promised, someone you know might be here then they might be gone. I learnt the extent of human kindness, but also the extent of human greed — both know no bounds.”
Sierra Leone — the location of Britain’s largest slave trade fort — appears physically, emotionally and spiritually in his films. “You can’t think about global history without thinking about Sierra Leone. It is a place to think about the world. I am figuring out how to tell my own story within that history and from that place. It will always come back as a site of return for me.” He will go back again soon to continue work on a series, After the Ocean.
The ocean is another recurrent image throughout Julianknxx’s work — a metaphor for history but also a representation of Freetown and the coastlines of Sierra Leone. “In Praise of Still Boys” (2021), currently being screened at Tate Modern as part of A World in Common, was shot on Freetown’s beaches. The film takes the form of a fluid oral history, moving evocatively between images of young men in the Atlantic Ocean and traditional dance, between Krio narration by the poet’s mother about Julianknxx’s birth and a poem read by him telling his version of his early life.
The trio of films offers the choir not only as a subject, but as a prism for viewing and feeling black and African diaspora experiences in Europe. In Barcelona, one interviewee speaks of the way sharks in the Atlantic changed their routes during the slave trade, when more than a million people perished in the sea. “Thinking about that messed my mind up, that mass trauma — so that was part of the thinking premise, our relationship to the water. As a black African person, the ocean holds the beauty of possibilities, but it also holds the trauma we all carry with us. It is death, rapture, hope, tragedy.”
The power of choral song, particularly for diaspora and migrant communities, is at the centre of “Chorus in Rememory of Flight”. The films explore the way communal singing preserves traditions — such as a choir in Marseille whose songs are based on traditional lullabies from the Comoro Islands — or how it provides solace and solidarity, or may promote collective healing. “There’s a release and relief when people come together and sing together — even if they’re not the best singers — something happens in that space, when everyone is dancing and letting go.”
Although Julianknxx makes films, he is a poet for an image-based era. His practice began with poetry, which he started out doing live while at university. But he didn’t enjoy performing directly to camera — the convention for young poets on YouTube. An early performance at the Southbank Centre’s Literature Festival in 2018 bathed the room in blue light, with a screen showing images “to get people to understand what Sierra Leone is to me”.
The pace of his poems is inspired by readings performed at ceremonies such as weddings and funerals in Sierra Leone, moving between speech and song, Krio and English, proverbs and personal invocations. “The way we gather and sing songs at home, that was our therapy — all these practices help you with life or see you through a transition. I want to find ways to carry these things into the work, to find new ways to congregate and create new rituals.”
Julianknxx is now adept at stitching sounds and languages to evocative, hazy moving images and at creating environments that hold the viewer in the present while summoning history — though ultimately they are empowered by projecting into the future. In the dim-lit, meditative throb of his installation at The Curve there are contrasts of motion, in dance and song, and stillness (he filmed one subject in Lisbon simply sleeping).
The films ask the viewer to pay attention, listen, feel — and ultimately, to keep going forward, to follow the light, in a spiritual and literal sense, of the exhibition. “The world keeps moving and we have to move with it — we’ve moved across the world with time, and now we need to find new ways to hold space for each other.”
