"In the Wake of Drexciya": Yemanja Aesthetics in the work of Ayana V. Jackson

• In Event: Aesthetics and waterways

Description for Program

This paper explores the installation at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, by artist Ayana V. Jackson, entitled "From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya.” Jackson mounts an exhibition which is a collection of photographs, animations, immersive videos, larger than life installations, sounds, and scents, to explore the afterlife of the deceased ancestors from the transatlantic slave trade. Jackson plays on conceptualization of Drexciya, the Afrofuturistic mythical world created by the musical techno duo James Stinson and Gerald Donald in the early 1990s. Drexciya is the underwater world created by the children of pregnant women who died in the ocean. Either thrown to their deaths in the ocean or jumping to prevent their enslavement, these children swam from the wombs of their mothers, living in the ocean’s depths. I read various installations through the aesthetics of the orisha, Yemanja, as the mother of everyone, who is considered the guardian force of the ocean. I specifically examine the ways that Jackson plays with this imagery in her installations (some underwater), to generate a link between birth, life, death, and the cycle of regeneration.

Author

• Cheryl Sterling, Pennsylvania State University