Spring of 1941, Martinique is a commemoration of the moment when Suzanne Roussi/Césaire, Aimé Césaire and Rene Menil hosted a walk with many of the “degenerate” artists from Europe who escaped Nazi power on the last ship from Marseilles. It is a sound and word audio by the Insurrections Ensemble.
The Insurrections Ensemble felt that it should craft a sound and word audio commemorating a historic walk led by the Césaires 80 years ago. The result is Of Wounds, of Hands crafted from their diaries, accounts and poems. During that Spring, Suzanne Roussi/Césaire, Aimé Césaire and Rene Menil hosted a walk with many of the “degenerate” artists from Europe who’d made it out on the last ship from Marseilles escaping Nazi power. There were Wilfredo Lam, Andre Breton, Andre Masson, Anna Seghers, who shared a passage with Victor Serge and Claude Levi Strauss as well. They all left art, poetry and diary notes about the encounter. That anti-fascist moment involved the spirits of negritude, afro-cubism, surrealism, social and socialist realism. The indebtedness of our work to the Césaire’s has been marked by prior work; our indebtedness now is about his poetic insistence that our wounded raised hands are still open to all wounded hands on earth. In such moments of rising neo-fascism we need to say, we still bear witness- Hum Dekheinge
Poets: Vivek Narayanan, Dennis Hirson, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers
Oralists: Thabo Bopape, Rhoda Isaacs, Purav Goswami, Astrid von Kotze, Morné Steyn
Composers and performers: Reza Khota, Kathyayini Dash, Ronan Skillen, Dean Henning, Sumangala Damodaran, Sazi Dlamini, Ari Sitas
