Dreaming Rivers (1988) is a film written and directed by Martina Attille for Sankofa Film & Video. In this allegorical work, actor Corinne Skinner Carter performs the role of Ms T, a black Caribbean woman in transition. Her children Daughter (Angela Wynter), Sister (Nimmy March) and Sonny (Roderick Hart) sit at her bedside and attend to the unspoken intimacies of history and transnational belonging.
Considering the legacy of Dreaming Rivers Alice Rekab has written a short text to accompany this film. Sometimes our dreams depend on what is not available explores the film’s influence and resonance within the artist’s own experience of intergenerational migration and its significance within the FAMILY LINES PROJECT.
Dreaming Rivers was released by Sankofa Films in 1988 when I was one year old. (I am the white passing child of a mixed marriage born in a very white space.) The Dublin of late the 1980’s and early 1990’s was a monoculture and I was the only one I knew with a Black dad and a Black grandmother.
I learned our story by heart. I carried a photo, who we were and where we came from. I taught people how to say our surname. These were fragments of lives remembered, and retold, woven together to make some kind of sense to anyone who asked the question “where are you from?”
Because of my light skin tone, people questioned if I was my father’s child. (Unreliable, suspicious, unlikely.) I lived twenty nine years of a life before I saw anyone who was, and who looked, like me on screen.
In Dreaming Rivers I saw for the first time a family that looked like mine, tonally and emotionally. (I didn’t know there were grandmothers like mine out there in bedrooms and in grief just like mine, the shared spaces of the African Diaspora.) This was underscored all the more by the variation in our geographical placement, Attille’s vision of a Caribbean maternal space, and mine that of a Sierra Leonean.
The resonance of the Atlantic passage Dreaming Rivers lays over and enmeshes with my histories and memories and into my work speaking to the loneliness of Black women in mixed marriages far from home. Telling me about the cold, the isolation and the physical dependence.
Martina Attile’s Dreaming Rivers inaugurates the FAMILY LINES PROJECT through its representation of intergenerational migrant experience, its veneration of domestic space, and the personal, syncretic relationship between the maternal and the objects of devotion in her home. The few things she has power over. I often consider my grandmother’s experiences of powerlessness in relation to her husband and her children, how she negotiated a city/country/location/new place and found her space of sanctuary in her bedroom, during the time she spent here in Dublin from the mid 1960’s to 2014 when she died.
Presenting Dreaming Rivers at the start of the FAMILY LINES PROJECT is a way to share/stating/making clear my artistic heritage. It pays respect to the work of Martina Attile and asks what this film could do and mean for another generation of African descent living in Ireland today.
Alice Rekab, September 2021
Dreaming Rivers (1988) is a film written and directed by Martina Attille for Sankofa Film & Video. In this allegorical work, actor Corinne Skinner Carter performs the role of Ms T, a black Caribbean woman in transition. Her children Daughter (Angela Wynter), Sister (Nimmy March) and Sonny (Roderick Hart) sit at her bedside and attend to […]
Open House is an annual three-day festival of architecture, opening up usually inaccessible architectural treasures to the public with a programme of tours and talks. A renowned example of Brutalist architecture, The Douglas Hyde Gallery will be participating in Open House 2021 with a day-long programme of tours. Join us on 16 October 2021 between 10am […]
We are delighted to announce an In Conversation event where our Director, Georgina Jackson will talk to David Lunney, Áine McBride and Katie Watchorn about, amongst other things, their collaboration on the From Here to There exhibition project. The conversation will take on Thursday, 3 February, from 7 pm at The Douglas Hyde. The event […]
What materials does an artist decide on and what are the reasons behind the choice? How do artists transform materials? How do materials convey meaning? The question of how and why an artist uses materials has long been a topic of consideration in art history. Today, many artists are looking to this question and seeking […]
Gallery staff will give informal lunchtime tours of the exhibition by David Lunney, Áine McBride and Katie Watchorn: From Here to There each Saturday at 2pm until the show ends on February 5, 2022. All are welcome and there is no need to book a place.
The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present the second of the screenings of Art from the African Diaspora as part of Alice Rekab’s multi-platform project FAMILY LINES: Black Audio Film Collective’s film Twilight City (1989).
Open House is an annual three-day festival of architecture, opening up usually inaccessible architectural treasures to the public with a programme of tours and talks. A renowned example of Brutalist architecture, The Douglas Hyde Gallery will be participating in Open House 2021 with a day-long programme of tours. Join us on 16 October 2021 between 10am […]
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