Gabrielle Goliath | Venice 2024

4 x multi-channel video & sound cycles
Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque, Foreigners Everywhere

Personal Accounts is a transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair.

As an ongoing series of video and sound cycles (first initiated in 2014), Personal Accounts addresses the global normativity of patriarchal violence and the multiplicity of ways in which black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary and trans individuals survive – cultivating para conditions in which to thrive.

In cycles produced in cities across the world, women and gender-diverse collaborators share their personal accounts of survival and repair. At times they revisit traumatic experiences of physical, sexual, emotional and/or material harm. In other instances they unpack the more incremental, everyday structures, norms, expectations and encounters that uphold patriarchy and recycle the precarity of feminine and non-gender-normative lives. But these are not accounts of violence only. Rather, they trace and celebrate the creative, often fugitive ways in which survivors assert life and possibility within and despite conditions of negation.

In a decision taken by the artist, with the prior consent of her collaborators, the spoken words of each account are withheld. What remains is a paralinguistic sonic stream of in-between moments: breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter – inducing the beside, nearby, adjacent and beyond of what is said, not said, or if said, not heard. Foregoing lexicality, this is a gesture of care and recognition, disarming the preconditions of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ that so regularly undermine the testimonies (and so experiences) of survivors. Asserted instead is the shared breath and presence of the collaborators themselves.

As the different cycles collectively sound, participants are drawn into a para space of sonic entanglement, of personal accounts that exceed the voice/voiceless dichotomy of political representation. This calls for a different kind of relation, a politics of love and avowal that doesn’t disregard intersectional difference, contextual specificities, or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.

The installation in Venice includes two full Personal Accounts video cycles (There’s a river of birds in migration and Deinde Falase), and two video diptychs extracted from two larger video cycles (Mango Blossoms and Lago di Como).

Acknowledgements
Project produced by Gabrielle Goliath, with support from: Galleria Raffaella Cortese - Milan, Albisola; Goodman Gallery - Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, New York; Kamel Lazaar Foundation; Department of Journalism, OsloMet University; and Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh.

Special thanks to the Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates, Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, Telefono Donna, Melissa Parry, and Make Perceive.

There’s a river of birds in migration, (Personal Accounts), 2024
4-channel video & sound installation
filmed in Johannesburg (2023)
Edition of 3 + AP
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The title of this 4-channel cycle is taken from a liturgy scripted, composed and performed for the occasion by artist, activist and House of Diamonds mother, Treyvone Moo.

There’s a river of birds in migration
A nation of women with wings
A river of birds in migration
A nation of mothers who sing

Treyvone is joined by Maneo, Sapphire and Hopewell, who together share personal accounts of trans precarity and survival in Johannesburg, South Africa. In a crisis norm of anti-black, anti-femme, homophobic and transphobic violence, trauma is everyday and everywhere. Nevertheless, these personal accounts exceed the conditions of negation from which they are spoken, read and sung. Asserted alongside grief, disappointment, fears and losses are hope, creativity, beauty, community, poetry, desire, generosity, faith, transition, love and, perhaps most emphatically, presence.

Deinde Falase (Personal Accounts), 2024
3-channel video & sound installation
filmed in Johannesburg (2023)
Edition of 3 + AP
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As a well-known news anchor at the Nigerian Television Authority in Abuja, it fell to Deinde Falase to publicly announce the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill, signed into law by President Goodluck Jonathan on January 7, 2014. In addition to criminalising same-sex marriage, the bill further imposed a 10-year prison sentence on individuals engaging in or ‘making a show’ of same-sex amorous relationships, as well as those frequenting gay clubs or associating with organisations or societies supportive of gay rights. Shortly after the announcement, Deinde left Nigeria for South Africa, where the rights of LGBTIQ+ people are constitutionally enshrined. Ten years later, however, he is still an asylum seeker without a work permit, unable to find employment despite his credentials, which include a Masters Degree from the University of Leeds. Failed by yet another state, the precarity of his experience is heightened by the everyday threat of Afrophobic and homophobic violence in South Africa. Deinde’s account is shared in three parts. In the centre panel he addresses his beloved mother, who died before he felt able to fully disclose his sexual identity, and whose funeral in Nigeria he was unable to attend. The account to the right is directed towards his supportive elder brother who lives in the USA, and to the left, his younger brother in Nigeria who has all but disowned him.

Mango Blossoms (Personal Accounts), 2024
Video diptych, extract from 22-channel video & sound installation (11 video diptychs)
filmed in Edinburgh (2024)
Edition of 3 + AP
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Survival is mango blossoms, memory, starry skies, friendships (imperfect), dancing in the rain, going to art school, essential oils (pine scented), finishing a degree, keeping the faith, disbelieving in god, lost in the cosmos, found in journaling, poetry, remembering, not forgiving, refusing, rerouting, re-learning (to love), or not, choosing transition, transcendence, a house boat commune, channelling Haifa Wehbe. It is more than one thing (victimhood), one angle (scrutiny), one account (continuity = credibility), one timeline (healing). Gathered in this cycle of eleven accounts is a tenuous community of immigrants, activists, students, survivors - based in, from, or passing through Edinburgh. In dual video accounts they map out experiences of misogyny, racism and rape; of harassment and disregard; of state, church and familial cultures of violence and disavowal; and of gender-critical agendas in Scottish social and political hierarchies that actively undermine black, brown, femme, queer and trans wellbeing. Some collaborators reveal their names, show their faces, claim visibility. Others show-up differently, for reasons of self-care, safety and/or a willed opacity. What all of them share in so many ways is something of what survival looks, feels and sounds like, and what it means in spite of all - in the words of one who chooses to withhold her name - “to navigate your life with love, courage and wisdom”.

Lago di Como (Personal Accounts), 2024
video diptych, extract from 16-channel video & sound installation (7 video diptychs & 2 single video channels)
filmed in Como (2024)
Edition of 3 + AP
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Lake Como is beautiful, wealthy people retire there. It’s the north Italian idyll: lakes, mountains, villas, wine, food, lifestyle. It is also a place of fugitive arrivals and departures - of tentative community, precarious labour and unbelonging, And, cutting across its differential hierarchies (of race, culture, privilege and legal status), patriarchy draws a fault line, marking feminised lives as available to violence and subjecting survivors to (further) social and political invalidation. Every year, the Como branch of Telefona Donna responds to over 250 new cases of gendered violence and sexual assault, offering psycho-social support, legal counsel and love to women in distress. Shared in this cycle of Personal Accounts are the difficulties, hopes and asserted life practices of nine survivors: artists, writers, cleaners, mothers, entrepreneurs. For some this is home, for others yet another making of it, having arrived in Lombardy (for so many reasons) from Senegal, Morocco, Brazil, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Connecting this tight Telefona Donna family - across their many differences - is not the common bind and social circumscription of ‘victimhood’, but the nourishment, affection, solidarity and joy through which they exceed it. Como is beautiful - made beautiful in these quotidian offerings of arrival, transition, home-making and repair: in Zohra’s prayers, in Diarra’s bar, in Ecaterina’s photo book, and in the fragile remains of what these personal accounts choose to reveal and withhold.