Rock and Water: An Afronautic Journey on Newfoundland’s Shores

My recent work is a meditation on 19 slave ships that were constructed in eighteenth-century Newfoundland. Using a research-creation approach I have named Afronautics, I critically investigate silences that shroud this ghostly past revealing its connections to the transAtlantic trade in humans and defamiliarizing what appears to be an innocent landscape that has not been tampered with. This work traverses the landscape and the seascape of Newfoundland linking it to Europe and Africa and back again. The results of this unmapping are expressed as interdisciplinary artworks that retrace and record the journeys I have made by walking on land and travelling across the ocean in the hold of a ship through the archival records. My work maps my process, the ‘facts’ I encountered, and the affects these produced in my body.

Dr. Camille Turner is an explorer of race, space, home and belonging. Straddling media, social practice and performance art, her work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally. Wanted, a collaboration with Camal Pirbhai, was shown most recently at the Art Gallery of Ontario and uses the trope of fashion to transform 18th century newspaper posts by Canadian slave owners into contemporary fashion ads. Freedom Tours, created collaboratively with Cree-Metis artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle is a national commission for LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017 that consists of participatory, site-specific events that re-imagine and reanimate land and water from Black and Indigenous perspectives. The Afronautic Research Lab is a reading room in which participants encounter buried histories. The Landscape of Forgetting, a walk created collaboratively with Alana Bartol and sonic walks HUSH HARBOUR and The Resistance of Peggy Pompadour evoke sites of Black memory that reimagine the Canadian landscape. Miss Canadiana, one of her earliest projects, challenges perceptions of Canadianness and troubles the unspoken binary of “real Canadian” and “diverse other”. Camille is the founder of Outerregion, an Afrofuturist performance group. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Environmental and Urban change at York university and is currently Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at UofT’s Daniel’s faculty.