BRINGING TOGETHER THE ENDS OF THE WORLD: ART, HISTORY, SLAVERY IN MEMORY

Bringing Together the Ends of the World is an encounter with visual, literary, musical and critical works, from the United States and the Caribbean, which carry within them the memory of transatlantic slavery. The history of slavery did not stop with abolition; it continued with expressions specific to segregation, racism, lynchings, prison, and the social, cultural, political and police repression of the 20th and 21st centuries in all countries that experienced it. By invoking artists, writers, and intellectuals who based their practice on the irreversible rupture caused by four centuries of triangular trade, Elvan Zabunyan questions what this history continues to produce today. The survival of the memorial traces of slavery and their transmission are a unifying force in artistic creations, making dispersion and fragmentation an eminently aesthetic and poetic question. The back and forths in space and time, as well as the omnipresence of a past that illuminates the present, are thought of by the author as embraces crossed by affects, making the history of art that she writes a situated, sensitive and committed narrative.