Geoffrey Chambers
Artist - Creative
The world reimagined
The dreams of those who sailed across the sea /Shine Bright/ The dreams of souls in the belly of the beast/ Shine Bright.
Shine Bright inverts our gaze to evoke an uninhabited space in our imagination. Here, down is up, west is east. A new perspective, a dislocated world view of Africa and the Atlantic, familiar yet not so. We know this place, but in this altered globe there is a shift in relations, a rubbing against the nominative imposition of our identities, our cultures, our texts, our histories, our nations and our attachment to them. Do we still belong, do we still own these nominative identities? Do you see it, do you touch it, feel it, east is west. Mother sea and Father land. Freedom dreamt as property is today’s lived emancipated joy? European histories and colonisation are dark fictions in an Afrosurrealist future where the traces and formations of a transatlantic culture have become the cultural metres of the planet.
The inverted globe subverts our gaze and sense of belonging to the earth as we know it, and the only mapping other than the dark sea and the red earth is the appreciation of the cultural texts created by the descendants of those who made the transatlantic journey in chrome. This appreciation is the shining of Samba, of Salsa and Soul, it is the shining of Blues, Bebop and Boogie, Reggae, Jazz, Calypso, Funk, Afrobeat, HipHop and Carnival. All shine brightly on the earth. Caporiera and the legacies of Gospel, Vodun, Santeria, Candomble and Jazz, Jerk, Jambalaya and Gumbo glisten and migrate across the earth; to Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceana as well as the cultural return beat to Africa. We sparkle, diamonds in the blackness of the Atlantic, diamonds sprinkled on the blood red lands.
Shine bright.
