I’ll Be Back!

Bodies of water are intervened upon, moved, disrupted and exploited. Labouring bodies experience similar pressures from the same forces of power and extraction. Distant communities – Northern England and Jamaica – share similar histories of manipulation and oppression whose record is kept in the living memory of its waterways. But water, like people, can find a way to exert its own will.

Wake and soil, skin and voice: Hope Strickland's film locates a legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation beneath the archive's official chronicle, in the deep historical memory of the body. "If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever)" sings an alternate history of resistance—familial, elemental, and sensuous.