Camille Turner is an award-winning artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She has developed an Afronautic research approach that considers colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Camille is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and a Provost’s postdoctoral fellowship at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.
One of the things that I found out through my research for Nave is that some of the first builders of Newfoundland were shipwrights. They built the ships that carried enslaved people, but they also built the town. And so, if you look up into the naves of these churches in Newfoundland, you’re also looking down into the holds of ships.
Fig 1. Installation View, Camille Turner, Nave, 2022
Fig 2. Installation View, Camille Turner, Nave, 2022
The following text is an excerpt from With Opened Mouths: The Podcast. It has been edited for content and clarity.
Qanita: What kind of child were you, did your artistic practice start in childhood?
Camille: I think a lot of these things do start in childhood, and I love that question. I was a very curious child. I was very quiet. I read a lot. I was really into nature. I remember going into places where you’d find little bugs and flowers and leaves and bringing them home to my mom. And my mom would say, “These are imps and fairies.” And I just loved that. So for me, the world was just full of magic. [Laughs] I think that’s important for how things unfolded. And I realized too, when you asked that question, that I actually moved around a lot as a child. I went to four different schools by the time I was ten in two different countries. So, there was a lot of upheaval. And I remember when I came to Canada at nine years old, we visited the school that I was going to attend, and the teacher said, “Well, the children are going to tease you because you are another colour, so just tell them that sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
Qanita: Wow. My father said that same thing. I don’t know whether it’s a generational thing, but words have real power. They’re awesome.
Camille: They do. They absolutely do. So I actually used that phrase in one of my first pieces. It’s called Suit of Armour and it’s basically about what young Black children have to go through. The suit of armour, the skin that they have to wear to toughen up in order to survive the violence that they’re constantly around. So these kind of things, informed what I did. And I feel that my work is so much about home and belonging. This way of trying to situate myself in a place that felt utterly alien and in a place in which I felt like an alien. That was very alienating. So, I feel this spurred me and the work that I’ve done into action. And growing up in Hamilton too, Hamilton, Ontario, which is where I ultimately grew up, because I left Jamaica when I was nine. We went to Sarnia, Ontario, which is at the Windsor border with Michigan. And then we came a year later to Hamilton. And there was so much open bigotry in Hamilton. It was a place in which I felt that I was always confronting animosity. I had to really learn how to understand what was going on. And my response to it was humour, Miss Canadiana, for instance. It was a very playful, humorous piece, but it got to the crux of that irony.
Qanita: And something that you mention about your sense of irony. Coming from South Africa, like I do, we’ve got this sense, even in the way that we speak, that using irony is an indicator of possibility.
Camille: Oh, I love that.
Qanita: I’m interested in how people responded to you as a beauty queen…
Camille: Well, that’s the thing that’s so interesting because it’s a piece that operates on so many different levels. A lot of times people don’t really know what’s going on. They’re confronted by their own expectations. I remember one time I was sitting, and it actually happened a few times where I was sitting having tea with a bunch of people wearing the whole regalia. And someone asked me “So where are you from?”
My work is about storytelling. Jamaica is a place of stories. And, I grew up surrounded by storytellers. I remember Duppy stories, stories of spirits, all kinds of, Rolling Calf stories. These were very frightening spirits. My uncle told me stories like that. They’re so scary that I couldn’t even go to sleep. And my dad tells the Anansi stories. He’s amazing at an Anansi story. So these are the kind of stories I grew up with.
And I love that. These stories, some of them were passed on to us through our ancestors. They survived the middle passage. They came in the hold of these slave ships, and they populate the places where the diaspora lives. So Jamaica is a place of stories. And I love creation stories. I love mythic stories that explain how we came to be, how things came to be. So, I think for me, the stories are the environment that I grew up in and I use storytelling in my work. Right now, I’m working on a piece called Fly. Fly was a slave ship that was built in Newfoundland. When it sailed to West Africa, people were put into its hold. Africans on the coast liberated the people in the hold. So I thought it was so interesting that it was called Fly. So in the diaspora, there are all kinds of stories about flying Africans, people who flew back home. The story of return.
Qanita: Which events helped you to research absented Black Canadian history?
Camille: When I moved into an area in downtown Toronto known as The Grange, that’s when I started thinking about what people of African descent were here before me. My father had been in that area in the ’60s, and I have a good friend who grew up there in the ’40s and ’50s. And I also met women who were raised in that area. There’s a church there that is still a Black church to this day. It’s the oldest Black institution in the city. The U.N.I.A. [Universal Negro Improvement Association] was founded right there. All of these things happened there and yet, if you walk around in that area right now, you would never know that there had been a Black community there. And this was once a very vibrant community. So many things happened there, and yet it was completely overwritten, completely erased. And so, I kept thinking, “How could this history just get wiped out?” How can this city just not acknowledge what had been. And the people that are living there now also had no idea. And so, I invited Afua Cooper, who is one of the foremost historians of Black Canada to come on board, and we did a project. It was my very first project. It was Miss Canadiana’s Heritage and Culture Walking Tour. So, Miss Canadiana did a tour of the area, and basically told these stories. She walked around in the area and repopulated the area with the stories that had been erased. So that was my very first time doing that.
And Afua wasn’t just bringing me stories from the ’40s and ’50s, she was bringing me stories from 1793 to when the town was founded. And I found out that there was a woman named Peggy Pompadour, who lived and worked just steps from where I was living at that time. She was claimed as property by the administrator of Upper Canada. And the strange thing is, his name was all over everything. Peter Street, Russell Creek, Russell Hill Drive, his name was Peter Russell. And yet, I never knew anything about her or her family, and she had three children. And, of course, Peter Russell claimed them as property. And her husband was a free man. But when Russell tried to sell Peggy and one of her sons her husband couldn’t do anything about it. So, I wanted to think about, what freedom meant. What Black life was, whether you’re free or unfree in that time.
Qanita: What is your process in the archive?
Camille: Where do we even start? What I ended up doing—because I finished my dissertation, my PhD, just two years ago. And it was interesting because it was through COVID, and I had to find ways to work because I couldn’t go into archives, and I had to find ways to work. So, I went into memory and I went into just really thinking about what it is that I’m doing, and to start trying to articulate my methodology to try to be able to share what I’m doing.
I call what I do Afronautic Research. And the principles are this: I centre Blackness. And that’s hard to do. When I’m looking at these ads in the archive, they weren’t placed there by Black people. They were placed there by White people who thought of Black people as chattel, as property. So, I have to step into it. Centring Blackness sometimes means stepping into that story myself. I think about time as non-linear, and that is a very key element. If time is non-linear, then I can go into the future and I conjure a liberated future. A future in which Black people are truly liberated. And I anchor myself to that future. From that future, then I’m able to look into the past and that gives me insights that sheds light on the present. And then I think about imagination as a tool for world-making. And also looking at silence, because a lot of times that’s what we are faced with is silence. And silence not as a void, but it is informational and directional. Silence speaks volumes. Sometimes it’s the silence that really tells us what’s going on.
Qanita: Your piece Nave is part of the London show, Ukutula. The figure of the Afronaut in Nave is powerful. It speaks very well to your archival practice. Could you describe Nave for anybody who hasn’t seen it yet?
Camille: Nave is a free-channel immersive installation. I created it out of the experiences that I had looking at slave ships that were built in Newfoundland. I never knew that there were slave ships built in Newfoundland. I didn’t know about them until 2015 or 2016 when I was invited to Newfoundland by Bushra Junaid and Pamela Edmonds. Bushra shared her research with me, and one of the things that I found out was that there were slave ships built in this place. And not just Newfoundland, but all along the eastern seaboard of what became Canada. So, through this research, I found that there was something like forty-two ships built along the eastern seaboard, nineteen of them built in Newfoundland. So, I wanted to think about the thousands of people that were carried in the holds of these ships. There were 4,798 people carried in the holds of these ships. Over seven hundred died en route. And their bodies would’ve been thrown into the ocean. I wanted to think about these people, these nameless people, because my ancestors were carried on ships like these from Africa to the Caribbean and maybe even these very ships. I don’t know. I cannot trace it. And so, I think about these people as ancestors, and I wanted to honour them. So in Nave, one of the things that I found out through my research is that some of the first builders of Newfoundland were shipwrights. They built the ships that carried enslaved people, but they also built the town. And so, if you look up into the naves of these churches in Newfoundland, it’s also looking down into the holds of the ship.
So, I flipped the church and used the church as a way to enter the hold of a ship. And so the Afronaut, the time traveller, is coming into this nave hold to pour libations for the ancestors. And the other figure is an ancestral figure. And this is played by Emilie Jabouin, who is of Haitian descent. She comes out of the water, so this ancestral figure comes out of the water, and she’s singing in Haitian Creole. And it’s a reminder to the African diaspora of what we’ve overcome. And of who we are and of this whole journey. These two figures together comprise Nave. It’s a piece that came together so beautifully when we created it. But at the time, I could not go to Newfoundland. I had to hire a cinematographer to go and shoot the outside of the church.