P002 adrift: the bayou project
Sadah “espii’ Proctor | Artist
technical Director | Nicholas
Voice Narration by: Audrey
Original Song by: Candice Hoyes
Joyous Pierce | Curator
adrift: the bayou project
"We are born and have our being in a place of memory. We chart our lives by everything we remember from the
mundane moment to the majestic. We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer
us a world where there is no death, where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection."
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
With a distinguished career in sound, projection, and extended reality production, Sadah Espii Proctor continues
to make her mark in the field of immersive storytelling. Garnering awards from her peers for Outstanding Media
Design, and recognition for her contributions to the craft by Forbes Magazine and American Theatre Magazine
among a number of award nominations, it can be said that Espii’s technical skill and innovation in the
experimental field of immersive design is only surpassed by her talent for intuitive storytelling.
Following the multi-continental success of her immersive film Girl Icon (2019), adrift: the bayou project is a
much-anticipated invitation to dive deeper into the creative world of Sadah Espii Proctor. Commissioned by
Lincoln Center as an inaugural work for their Social Sculpture Project, and the first chapter in a larger body of
work adrift: the bayou project is an immersive sonic and mixed-reality folktale that transforms Lincoln Centers
Hearst Plaza into a multi-dimensional liminal space that blurs the borders of memory, history, and time. With
adrift: the bayou project Espii establishes an expansive footing in the tradition of Black folklorists like Corneila
Bailey, Zora Neale Hurston and Beverly J. Robinson whose rich engagement with culture as a practice walked hand
in hand with their creative and artistic forms of expression.
Born in the liminality of Espii’s dreamspace 7 years ago, glimpses of spirits, and bodies passing through the
murky water of a bayou beckoned to Espii for their stories to unfold. The years of research that followed into the
pre-and post-reconstruction era United States lives of African - Americans would reveal stories of black fugitivity,
liberation, political autonomy and marronage, rich with nuances of separation, loss and reunion. adrift asks you
to reflect on the roles that time - place - space - person - image and sound play in the creation of memory and
meaning within our lives.
As you enter the Hearst Plaza, 3 Haint Blue door frames greet you as gateways into the world of adrift. The hue
of these frames get their name from the spiritual belief held in Southern Gullah Geechee Coastal Culture1 that
anything painted in this particular shade of blue has the power to ward off “Haints,” also known as malicious
spirits. Once activated by your mobile device the “Haint Blue” frames become portals into the past draped with
delicate digital collages of newspaper clippings suspended through space.
Beginning as early as 1866 during the (gradual) enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation following the end
of the American Civil War - African - Americans who had been separated from friends, family and loved ones by
way of the American Slave Trade and the American Civil War - took to submitting ads and letters of inquiry into
Newspapers all over the United States to be sent as far abroad as Liberia, Brazil and Jamaica in search of
reconnection. These letters, penned by emancipated African - Americans represent profound acts of audacious
hope in search of reunion with their estranged loved ones.
Collected and archived by teams of scholars across two databases, the Lost Friends and Last Seen2. Together
totaling over 15,000 letters, these deeply vulnerable, public moments of longing and reunion offer windows into
the lives of emancipated African-Americans at a pivotal moment of community, economic, and identity
reclamation.
It is important to note that a majority of these ads were published in and by Black-owned and founded
newspapers. The impact of these publications during the Reconstruction-Era would contribute significantly to the
emergence of African-American political leadership for close to a decade during the Reconstruction era - before
the era’s failure in 1877.
In adrift ads and letters searching for the lost and celebrating the found form a network of narratives that you are
invited to traverse through from frame to frame guided by the voice of a Mother searching for her Daughter -
through the bayou.
A deliberate nod to the historical significance of bayous as sites of independence, refuge and joy for free and
fugitive African-Americans, the bayou exists here as a transitional plane. In adrift the bayou is not a sedentary
place, the bayou is an embodied voice and portal of storytelling here to guide you through a rememory3 of our
collective past.
There is an abundant political & cultural history of bayous in the southeastern United States as sites of resistance
and literal portals to autonomy for indigenous peoples and fugitive African Americans living independently from
society4 - also known as the maroons.
Records show that between 1672 and 1864, especially among the sparsely settled mountain, forest, or swampy
regions of South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama at least
50 maroon communities existed.5 These communities held distinct cultural practices and norms and were major
actors in the shaping of the nation from the colonial era through the end of the American Civil War.
For Espii and her collaborators, Gio & Joyous, a trip to the low country of South Carolina, its coast, bayous,
swampland, marshes, former rice plantations, and sites of freemen subsistence rice production would provide a
creative alchemy that would be integral to shaping the visual and sonic experience of adrift.
In adrift Espii activates her “aural and visual sense for the transmission of meaning”7 to transform visual and
sound recordings captured on-site in Charleston, South Carolina at Ion Swamp (the site of a former rice
plantation) and Harvest Gardens (black-owned land that borders Francis Marion State Park) into a mixed - reality
immersion that blurs the borders of space and time.
Drawing inspiration from the Afro-diasporic tradition of oral storytelling the audio and visual cues of the bayou
act in their own way as griots (west-African storyteller/historians of the oral history tradition) calling out for you
to respond with your presence and interact.
You see, you, visitor, are the steward of this story
Your presence - propels the story forward
Your cues, questions, reflections, gestures and demands8 are rituals of regard and recollection9
As you travel from frame to frame through the bayou we ask that you listen with compassion, move mindfully and
do not isolate this work from the contemporary context of the institutional space you find yourself in, as well as
the larger global context of loss, separation and joy of reunion that links adrift to the continuum of stories shaped
by forced migration through time.
We pay our respect and deep gratitude to the indigenous stewards of this land and the lands of our ancestors
We pay our respect to and remembrance to the people of San Juan Hill who were forcibly evicted from this land
may we always remember:
“How we choose to tell our stories -
Is how they tell their story”
Photos by Wil Pierce
Sources:
2Information Wanted. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://informationwanted.org/, The Historic New Orleans Collection. (n.d.). Lost Friends:
Advertisements from the Southwestern Christian Advocate. Retrieved from https://www.hnoc.org/database/lost-friends/
3 Saleh-Hanna, V. (2015). Black feminist hauntology: Rememory the ghosts of abolition? Champ Pénal/Penal Field, XII. https://doi.org/10.4000/champpenal.9168
4 South Carolina Encyclopedia. (n.d.). Maroons. Retrieved from https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/maroons/
5 South Carolina Encyclopedia. (n.d.). Maroons. Retrieved from https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/maroons/
6 KyleFromOhio. (2017, November 22). The Ion Swamp. KyleFromOhio Blog. https://kylefromohio.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-ion-swamp.html