Berlin-based artist Clara Jo offers Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood in Bexhill

Spokeswoman Kitty Malton said: “Clara Jo (b 1986, United States) works with film, photography and installation to re-engage socio-political understandings of the world in ways that entangle the senses. She plays with speculative narratives to offer alternative readings of certain terrains, examining their material imprints and deep erasures. By reimagining these contexts through her work, Jo questions how these stories can feed into collective imaginations and fictions during moments of crisis. “Jo’s practice is concerned with how we unearth the past in order to understand our present and future realities. This new film is grounded by documentary footage shot by the artist whilst embedded with a research group from Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage on location in Albion and Flat Island, Mauritius. In Albion, Jo filmed the excavation and preliminary analysis of human skeletal remains from an unmarked cemetery on a former cotton plantation and sugar estate, as well as footage from Flat Island, an uninhabited islet located twelve kilometres off the north coast of Mauritius. This islet had been used as a 19th-century quarantine and detention station for indentured labour during several waves of the cholera epidemic. “Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood weaves fictive imaginings through the concrete realities of these ghostly terrains via computer-generated animation drawn from research within colonial archives in London. In doing so, the work makes visible certain scars that are hidden within these island landscapes and highlights the human capacity to forget the most traumatic parts of our history, privileging sanitised versions of the past in their place. “The film is narrated through the perspective of the Paille-en-queue bird, which has inherited oral histories from their ancestors of all they have witnessed from an aerial perspective. Spanning different elevations and time registers, this avian narrator highlights and commemorates erased and unknown histories from the legacy of British and French colonialism and movements of indentured labour across the Afrasian Sea (Indian Ocean). “Nests of Basalt, Nests of Wood continues Jo’s ongoing interest in epidemiological flows across space and time and our relationships with the non-human world, previously explored in her film, De Anima (2018-21). An ominous prelude to the Covid-19 pandemic, this work considers the interfaces where ecosystems feed into global conflict within the context of scientific research into new strains of coronaviruses in bat caves in Myanmar. Both of these recent works by Jo draw attention to the human fears underlying our systems of health and how these have been instrumentalised through mechanisms of power to contain, control and harm others with whom we share our environments. By drawing together fact and fiction in a way that makes space for unwritten archives, Jo’s mode of storytelling seeks to heal the scars of our past.”