Fringe of Colour 2023: Ashanti Harris on Black Gold

Glasgow-based Ashanti Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher, whose work is often inspired by interesting materials and the movement of landscapes and people. Describing her work as a “sonic dance sculpture,” her most recent piece is a visual poem called Black Gold, commissioned as part of the upcoming Fringe of Colour festival this month. Black Gold delicately examines the interaction between extraction practices, coloniality, and our connection as humans to the environment.

Harris speaks of materiality: “My background is in sculpting and I think I just get kind of obsessed with the material and its texture and what it evokes.” The film represents this with a combination of layered soundscapes, visuals, and movement that coalesce to create a unique projection of oil and its conceptual function in our society. 

When asked what inspired the piece, Harris says “pressure” and laughs. In talking about the development process, she says that being given such an important platform was an honour, and that she knew she needed to say something important. After trying out some dance workshops and film ideas, she found her inspiration for Black Gold in the words of Foluke Taylor, who suggested that she “stop interrupting the ancestors.”

After reading this, Harris says, the film began to flow more easily. “Since 2019, I’ve been doing a lot of research into historical, but also contemporary colonial relationships and how they continue to exist within capitalist structures. In 2019, Georgetown, Guyana was twinned with Aberdeen after oil-producing sandstone was found on the island.” She emphasises how oil is linked to colonial history, and specifically to Black history.

“The oil has been something that I've been thinking about a long time," Harris says. In her eyes, it is “what occurs after transformations happen over and over again, more times than you could possibly imagine.” It forms under pressures, hidden in the earth like a life force, and it is representative of a pattern both inside the earth and enacted upon it through post-colonial extraction arrangements. Black Gold evokes the nature of oil as not just the environmental evil that we have come to perceive, but as another aspect of the environment that we should look after. She calls it an “ancestral condensing of time” that runs “like veins through the earth.”

Harris's work of understanding the movements of people and ideas comes from the incentive of reimaging narratives from a Caribbean diasporic perspective. The film consists of images and video footage collected from Tanzania, Guyana, and Scotland. When asked if this was intentional, she says, “Sort of… There is so much overlaying and overlapping of culture, of landscape, of history.” She gives me the example of a dandelion she once saw on Mount Kilimanjaro. “I had been walking around and seeing all these amazing, beautiful plants – things that are so unfamiliar to my landscape, and then I saw a dandelion.” From street names to plants, “there is a ghost of one landscape in another landscape.”

This layering of landscape is diasporic in its inspiration, and is represented in the layers of sounds, images and visuals; the images are from different places but converge to create a unification, even temporarily. “I sort of layer them and overlap them. Take the sound from one place with an image from another, and create this new world.” 

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Black Gold, part of Fringe of Colour, Summerhall, Edinburgh and online, 23-29 Jun
fringeofcolour.co.uk