Past is Present and Connects us to the Future
In collaboration with Red Clay, artists Julian Bozeman and Sarah Conarro (aka Mutual Phase) worked with community to create Past is Present and Connects us to the Future in Tamale this August.
Within The Parliament of Ghosts, community members built a living archive. Real-time cameras captured painting gestures and projected them onto walls where previous participants' completed work already hung—collapsing past and present into the same visual moment.
Over the month, twenty-four large-scale paintings emerged alongside twelve collaborative mobiles constructed from discarded materials. Local dancers and Breakers (Tamale's breakdancing troupe) performed within the projection space. Natural dye workshops produced fabric samples. Song-making sessions filled Red Clay's decommissioned trains and airplanes, creating a collective composition.
The project brought together people of all ages and skill levels. Glass drilling, paper mache, painting, dancing, singing—each contribution became part of the accumulating work. Everyone present became collaborators.
How do our gestures today shape what tomorrow inherits? Past is Present explored this question through making together, revealing how individual actions fold into collective memory and how temporal boundaries can collapse through projection and presence.
Community members create collaborative paintings while overhead cameras document their gestures.
Installation view of the finished paintings, hung on the wall, which serve as projection surfaces for live-feed cameras and video of the creation of the installation.
Installation view of finished paintings created with different communities. Each painting's color scheme is created using color-matching with the natural environment.
Local dancers activate the installation. Their movements project onto the walls, interacting with the gestures of past participants.
The central section of the space is blanketed with scraps from the collaborative paintings. Overhead projectors project video documentation of the creation of the paintings. On entering the central section, community members, lit by the light of the projections, activate the installation as their movements are projected onto the paintings on the walls.
Detail: Mobiles made from discarded materials hang in front of large, mixed media collages. The collages combine individual and collaborative artworks made by community members.
Community members complete a set of paintings outside.
Artistic Director Selom Kudjie activates the installation. An image of Selom from the live-feed cameras projects onto the wall behind him.
Detail: One wall of the installation features a live-video feedback projection flanked by materials, tools, and fabric created during the fabric-dyeing workshops.