Sylvaine Dampierre

Black Soldiers, the Suspended Image is based on photographic archives of Black soldiers from the American Civil War. Most are albumen prints in the format of carte-de-visite photographs, whose reproducibility and circulation were made possible by technological advances in the 1860s. For many Black recruits, this was their very first opportunity to be photographed, by white photographers who followed the Union garrisons. These representations are deeply ambivalent: they oscillate between propaganda and self-assertion, between imposed identities and emancipation.

I appropriate these portraits of soldiers and Contrabands—fugitive enslaved people photographed upon their arrival behind Union lines—and re-inscribe them in the present, as bodies to encounter. I enlarge them to human scale, in order to re-enact their embodiment and reach a form of monumentality. I paint them in black and white on textile supports. On these hanging screens, the figures exist as much through projection as through imprint, at the intersection of photography, cinema, the painterly gesture, and material experimentation—as they are embroidered or worked in three dimensions.

These drawings form the matrix of an immersive installation that the residency in Louisiana will give greater depth to: encounters with historians, researchers, and descendants of this buried history; immersion in the cultural vitality of the region and the contemporary echoes of this history; and exploration of its landscapes and memorial sites. This immersion will give body and voice to my research. In particular, I am undertaking a visual and literary investigation into Peter, known as Scourged Back, the man with the lacerated back, an enslaved man who escaped and was photographed in Baton Rouge in 1863. To deepen and ground this story, to bring this fragile yet enduring figure back to the place where his story began, and literally suspend him within his original landscape, could initiate a fertile artistic and memorial gesture.

I do not know New Orleans; I come—at least half—from another America, the one that curves around the Caribbean Sea, that archipelago haunted by memory. The story of the Black Soldiers inevitably leads me to Louisiana, and Louisiana brings me back to Guadeloupe, my father’s homeland. In Louisiana, slavery first spoke French, and when I realized that these men whose traces I am seeking spoke Creole, the language my father never taught me but that has spoken to me all my life, I knew that I could inhabit their memory. New Orleans then emerged as the place for this quest: there, I will trace time backwards, back to the origins of these images.

I can delve into the archives from afar; I have done so before. But what Louisiana alone offers me is a territory where memory is still a struggle: a city that has removed its Confederate monuments, leaving behind empty pedestals and streets to be renamed, without settling the debate over what America chooses to erase or preserve. It is in this fissure that I want to inscribe these faces, these bodies, these stories.

I want to meet the heirs of this history, its keepers and those who carry it forward, those who preserve its language, those to whom it still speaks; to travel along the plantations of River Road and their quarters, see the bayous where fugitives sought refuge, the fields of sugarcane and cotton; and to uncover traces there, to suspend a presence.