Abstract:
In the year 2088, the artist Poem Johnson dies at the age of 102. His estate bequeaths his artworks and papers to the Kamau Brathwaite Center for Research in Black Studies. The archive contains eleven artistic outputs spanning Jacquard-woven textiles, video installations, performance works, and an artist book.
This is the speculative framework of Marc Johnson's practice-based dissertation, which examines how artists from diasporic communities can shape archival custody and posthumous reception of their work before institutional stewardship begins. The future-oriented framing draws on Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics, a geopoetic model of history that combines Einsteinian non-linear time with Caribbean routes and roots. Brathwaite argues that diasporic histories cannot be traced to a single origin point. In the context of African diaspora, where displacement and forced migration fracture linear genealogies, identity and history move in tidal patterns across multiple shores and temporalities. This dissertation reimagines tidalectics through material practice, using the speculative structure to displace linear historiography, interrogate the politics of memory-making, and challenge the assumed stability and permanence of archival records.
The artworks trace a research journey of artistic experiments conducted between 2021 and 2026. The Sea is History (2024) is a series of Jacquard-woven textiles that engage the colonial legacies of industrial textile production and cotton economies while rendering the ocean as living archive. The loom's punch-card system is itself an early form of data storage, and becomes a site for counter-archival practice that reclaims colonial infrastructure to materialize suppressed narratives. Sun/Sum (2024) is a performance work developed through public rehearsals that privileges process over product, establishing rehearsal-as-research methodology where Afrodiasporic movement vocabularies circulate through iterative process rather than fixed performance scores. Riot/Uprising (2023) is a three-channel video installation that foregrounds the materiality of decaying footage from the 1971 Attica prison uprising, directing attention across screens through sound remixing.
Through speculative fabulation, the dissertation generates a post-custodial future: practical frameworks for how artists from diasporic and Indigenous communities can intervene in preservation systems before depositing materials into institutional care, shaping how their work will be encountered, interpreted, and activated by future researchers and communities.
