An Unimaginable Leap

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.

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.

Existing at the convergence of history and myth, the Haitian maroon leader François Mackandal returns to disrupt the colonial logic of the archive.