Rise Up Residency
RISE UP RESIDENCY was a week-long mural project and educational programme taking place in September 2022 in Margate, Kent.
The initiative, headed by RISE UP. CLEAN UP and mural artist Louis Masai, saw the creation of 17 murals by local and international artists as a means of raising awareness of ocean conservation.
I partnered with Margate based artist, Catherine Chinatree to conceptualise this mural. Catherine’s work is inspired by the daily ritual of swimming in the sea at the Walpole Bay Tidal Pool in Margate. In planning the concept for this we swam together and had a lot of conversations about the sacred nature of the water as an ancestral realm and what can be known of those who experienced crossings on the slave ships sunk offshore. We discussed ideas of maintaining connections with them and the things we know these particular ancestors gave us that we are thankful for.
Most of the people who were transported on the ships that now lie close to Margate, such as the Shelburne which sank in 1773, came from regions of Senegambia (modern day Senegal, the Gambia and Guinea), from cultures that musical historians think gave us early versions of instruments like the banjo and styles that developed into blues. They also gave us words like ‘nyam’ and ‘jam’ (to eat and to play music) in Caribbean English and in Indian Ocean Creole they left us ‘welele’ which is a word to express emotion, especially joy.
We thought a lot about community and especially ideas of community that bridge spaces of land and water and physical and spirit. We shared books by Christina Sharpe, Kevin Dawson, Françoise Vergès and Rivers Solomon, and read poetry by Yvette Christiansë, Edouard Glissant, Ruben Lespoir and others during the time of Catherine’s designing and painting.
A figure we spent a lot of time discussing was Mame Coumba Bang – a deity from St Louis at the entrance to the Senegal river, where many of the people trafficked on the ships sunk off Margate were held in captivity before being taken on board. Mame Coumba Bang is a Mami Wata (a west African water deity). She is a creolised spirit developed within the colonial city of St Louis, having been merged with Indian and European ideas and imagery of mermaids. It is said that when Mame Coumba Bang is honoured she protects those who leave the city by sea. In St Louis today there are murals which depict Mame Coumba Bang. One story features her magic ring which she throws into the water when someone is lost beneath it. The ring emits a glow which can be followed by a swimmer and will lead the way to the lost person. A folktale from Martinique remembers a woman with a magical ring who mysteriously appears aboard a slave ship, saving the enslaved by allowing them to pass into the oceanic spirit world rather than be delivered to the plantations. At the very top of the mural is a golden ring. We imagine our version of a spirit who also uses a ring to protect the souls of those who died on the boards of the ships that ended up sinking off the coast of Margate.
Afro-mermaids with Breeze Yoko
In 2024 Rise Up Residency brought Cape-Town artist Breeze Yoko to Margate, to create another stunning mural. Breeze was introduced to me to gain a sense of how mermaids relate to the histories in the water, and the ruins of the former Lido that his mural looks over, as well as what the significance of Afro-mermaids is to some of us in the Margate community.
The black and white footage is material I found of the Lido when it was operational in the 1940’s, hosting beauty pageants that invoked mermaids to fulfil the role they’ve been assigned for thousands of years – conveying the values, stories, identity and spirit of people and communities touched by water.
Breeze’s mural overlooking the ruins of Lido, and the sea beyond, does the same. This time remembering the Afro-mermaids that have always existed beneath the surface in this town and in the waters of home, honouring our worldwide connections, community, and solidarity in struggles against injustice.