Camille Turner Afronautic Research Lab at Bonavista Biennale

Exerpt from an article by Valérie Frappier in  Canadian Art

Camille Turner, Afronautic Research Lab, 2016–.

Photo Brian Ricks.

Narratives of place are often sustained by tensions between absence and presence; site-responsive work can reveal such tensions. Near Bennett’s mural, a one-to-one replica of the ship that Caboto sailed from Europe to North America is housed in the Ye Matthew Legacy site, celebrating the vessel and its role in colonial expansion.

Along this same stretch of road by the town’s harbour, a largely unacknowledged part of the region’s naval history surfaced in Camille Turner’s installation at the historic Mockbeggar Plantation Fish Store. In this latest iteration of The Afronautic Research Lab (2016–), Turner drew attention to 19 slave ships built on the east coast of Newfoundland between 1751 to 1792 of which, unlike the Matthew, there is little to no documentation in the provincial archives. In the centuries-old fish store, a looped video depicted Turner embodying a figure from the year 2319, coming back to the present moment to speak of how an age of silence was lifted to give way to an age of reckoning. The installation, made up of traces left by this time traveller, functioned as a reading room containing texts about the context in which the ships were built—tools Turner provided to help collectively lift this silenced past.

There are ethics to any type of curating, especially outside of the gallery space. “Fundamentally—and I think this is key to any curatorial work—you want to align artists with site, with place, and with idea,” states co-curator Hills. “You want to seek those three in alignment and that’s key to any successful project. But for that to happen, you need to have an intimate, a real, respect for site, for place, and for the history of that place.” Part of that respect comes with responding to the complexities of an area, and providing platforms for the communities the project seeks to serve. Hills ultimately defines curatorial practice as public service.