Charles Campbell’s installation at The Power Plant speaks to African Diasporic healing, connecting past and present through sculpture and collective breathing. His work looks closely at the history of the Middle Passage – the transatlantic slave journey which shipped an estimated 12 million enslaved Black African peoples across the Atlantic Ocean over the course of 400 years. Campbell has used bathymetric readings beneath the Atlantic Ocean to collect data in locations where many ships sank and over 2 million African lives were tragically lost at sea. His installation uses these underwater measurements and re-creates the atmosphere by suspending a sculptural installation from the ceiling mirroring the submerged terrain where the African and North American plates meet. Surrounding the sculpture on the walls are nine coloured panels depicting audio spectrogram images created from the sound of breathing, gathered from Campbell’s preparatory workshops. For more information on this process, visit The Black Breath Archive.
Campbell’s installation serves as a pathway to African futurities, which were disrupted by tragic injustice and harm – giving possibility to these lost lives and offering healing to those living, while creating a safe space to find acknowledgement, solace and care. Through his installation, Campbell builds a sanctuary that invites and encourages both private and collective healing. The installation is accompanied by audio recordings of the tranquil and tumultuous atmospheres of the ocean.
For the learning activity, the exhibition space is set up with a calming corner. Charles Campbell invites visitors to listen to a 9-minute audio clip, also titled How many colours has the sea, and participate in a breathing exercise that moves us through loss, healing and a celebration of what is newly found.
Content Advisory: This Resource Guide and Campbell’s installation deal with grief, loss, and references to Black enslavement, with the intention of moving towards offering a space for collective healing. Some context touching on the history of the transatlantic slave trade is provided, but this Resource Guide is not a comprehensive history nor does it provide a substitute for counselling or therapy. It instead offers suggestions for meeting difficult, triggering situations with sensitivity and care.
For teachers and facilitators: We encourage you to read through the transcript ahead of your learning sessions to make note of difficult moments to unpack with your learners in advance. Consider framing “loss” in different ways (eg. related to immigration, refugee status, misplacing a treasured object, moving homes, etc.) Activity 1 from this Resource Guide can also be used as pre-work before engaging with the audio piece or transcript to prepare learners to work with this content, inviting personal responses, connections, and story-sharing. Please always consider the option to bypass this installation and/or learning tool if your learners wish to.
LISTEN TO HOW MANY COLOURS HAS THE SEA
Resource Guide
Suggested Age
Intergenerational
Curriculum Links
Social Studies, Canadian and World Studies, History, Geography, Science, Math, Afro-Diasporic Studies, Contemporary Art
Keywords
Ancestor, activism, archive, Black Canadian art histories, Black histories, Blackhurst, Black life, hidden narratives, journey, navigate, non-linear, personal, spatial, temporal, trans-atlantic slavery, tool, Toronto.
About the Contributors
Charles Campbell (he/him) is a Jamaican-born multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator whose practice animates the future imaginaries possible in the wake of slavery and colonization. His artworks, which include sculptures, paintings, sonic installations and performances, have been exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Vancouver Special, Disorientations and Echo at the Vancouver art Gallery, Fragments of Epic Memory at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Other Side of Now at the Perez Art Museum Miami. Campbell is the recipient of the 2022 VIVA Award and the 2020 City of Victoria Creative Builder Award. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith College and a BFA from Concordia University. He currently lives and works on lək̓ʷəŋən territory, Victoria BC.
Image Credit: Charles Campbell, How many colours has the sea, 2024. On view at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Co-commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and the National Gallery of Canada through the National Engagement Initiative, and co-presented with the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.