Antinomies of Remembrance is a moving image piece by Jermaine Francis, developed with researcher Deborah Ireland from archival material, related to specific events, and periods related to the East African and Indian Ocean slave trades. A small insight of an event of forced migration that spread across to multiple continents. A philosophical speculative meditation on power, space, photography and the complexities archives, shaped by absences, competing temporalities, and political entanglements.

The video dissects the control inherent in the act of photography, while making space for the humanity and resistance of those held within the image. Crucially, the work shifts its gaze away from the authority of the camera to position the audience to consider the interiority and the presence of the subjects themselves. How do we tackle these stories of the subjugated in the archives? Narratives of the subjugated that are further complicated, once we realise they are told by voices that are not their own.

Wrestling the archive’s silences, and fractured timelines, the work asks the possibility of narratives other than just the violence of these original images. Can we imagine a wider presence and agency of those within the frame to allow us to learn and imagine a shared future?

Antinomies of Remembrance is an ongoing joint project developed by artist/researcher Jermaine Francis in collaboration with researcher Deborah Ireland, supported by the Royal Geographical Society and Photoworks.