“Our Landscape Is Its Own Monument”: Using “Muscle Memory” to Make Home Space in Alien Environments in the Work of Jade de Montserrat: Spaces in Transit

Abstract

Vernacular black culture is often an unwritten one. Contemporary Black British artist Jade de Montserrat uses her own body in movement or stasis as cipher for personal and communal memory, to inhabit the gestures of her ancestors. She employs “muscle memory” to embody earlier black presences in her performances, and as a feminist artist, articulates the context of exploitative patriarchal relationships that have spectacularised and objectified the Black female body over the centuries. Her non-metropolitan British background, being brought up in rural Yorkshire, is an anomaly in a context where the urban and London-centric nature of debates about Blackness continue to have hegemonic power. In 2015 she made a film triptych, Clay, Peat, Cage, in collaboration with fellow Yorkshire filmmakers Webb-Ellis. In these films, she references and artistically reimagines her upbringing, narrating a rural and Northern Black culture in Britain and showing its connection to Black Atlantic dynamics to be as vibrant as in the metropole. Each film demonstrates different aspects of embodied Black history, from fugitivity to imprisonment, from violence to homemaking and from alienation to panoptical surveillance. Also fundamental to her praxis is her text-based watercolour Her Movement Creates a Muscle Memory (2016–2017), which etches out the words against a painterly background and indicates her belief that bodies carry traumatic histories so that memory is as much physical as mental. Her image of the “stripped migrant” illustrates the problematics of transporting diasporic cultures across geographies in the context of enslavement. For African Atlantic people, spaces in transit / spaces in stasis are often one and the same, confining and limiting freedom of expression and unhoming black presence. Montserrat’s work explores performative ownership of land that was unequally distributed and denied to black, female and working-class people, and invokes routes through its mobile mode, featuring her African diasporan body moving through the landscape—conjuring such black vernacular haunters of the British landscape as the itinerant fugitive slave James Johnson. This chapter investigates how Montserrat’s praxis uses her body to remember and conjure black presence in British landscapes where it has been hitherto marginalised and sometimes completely forgotten.