Madness in the art gallery on the opening of Timehri Film Festival 2023

Still from The Procession by Hew Locke

 

Madness 

"What is wrong with madness?" Bassodee Dolly asks in the film playing in the art gallery which once housed Burnham as I explained to the people from Belize who did not know they were standing in the space Burnham might have stood over Guyana which Janet Jagan converted into the Art Gallery.

Bassodee Dolly talks about being mad through Joan Cambridge-Mayfield in a film with some amazing archival footage which moved too fast. She wants to sell her land for 10 billion US dollars and dares anyone to say why the land is not worth that amount.

The film Just 3 People Talking doesn't seem to go anywhere or to be about anything really, but  it is about everything now. Ancestors,  African, Indian and others.. 'all our ancestors' , and imagining that they are speaking to ask to act now.

Joan Cambridge-Mayfield explains that she and idea for a Jumbie Jamboree,  and she felt The Procession by Hew Locke was that Jamboree. 

The Procession was the installation by Hew Locke paid for - as he hinted in his opening comments- with the money from sugar made by enslaved and indentured peoples. In the evening of the Castellani House Art Gallery, dark , the brilliant colours and the intricate work of the 'figures who are not going anywhere really'.  

In the art gallery in Guyana, watching the 140 figures which were about Guyana and other places far away. This is different from watching this film on a laptop or phone. It is as though the screen is a window now, extending the gallery in another time and place, and the work of Elodie Cage smith on the wall, in the shadow seems to form part of the guard in which we could imagine the figures in the Procession leaving the Tate last year and coming into Castellani House. 

Madness.. what is wrong with madness?

Art Gallery 

"You aint gun touch the ground as you go in' the brilliant photographer asks me as we go into the room with Vishnu Mahadeo's Ramlila. 

I could imagine anyone watching me thinking I was mad to be touching the random floor.. would I be honouring Burnham, or to imagine the space as sacred because the student from the University of Guyana had converted the room into a setting of puppets playing Ramlila. 

We discuss whether Ravan is the lion sculptured like how Winslow Craig would do one, as the lion in Hindu mythology is Narsingh.. an avatar of Lord Vishnu and not necessarily 'evil'.  Many of us Hindus imagined Burnham as Ravan... if I did bend down and touch the floor I would have to make sure I orient myself correctly or it would seem I was honouring Ravan and not the tableau of Rama, Sita, Laxman and Hanuman.

Ramlila is playing in other parts of the world this week, except in Guyana where it is fortunately an installation and reminder of what used to be

And in Just 3 People talking, I catch glimpses of the sacred Hindu altar, which I come home and go look and realise is part of the worship space of St Paul's Spiritual Baptist Church in Buxton, Guyana. 

There are images of the procession of the St Paul's Spiritual Baptist Church too, people honouring the gods of all ancestors in Guyana.. things which others would say is 'madness'. Hew Locke says his procession pays homage to all ancestors too.

I have to leave though before the film  about an ancestor who is not honoured too much in Guyana  - Walter Rodney.  Walter Rodney in the house where Burnham must have cursed him. Both dead now.

There is  nice moonlight, the procession of cars on the road going somewhere.. 

the gates are wide open, the guard hut is closed, no guard with a gun like the last time I was here.

The Timehri Film Festival continues  until Sunday 29th October, 2023.