Riding waves of memory with Racquel Rowe’s The Centre of the World was the Beach

Racquel Rowe’s exhibition The Centre of the World Was the Beach is a contemplative video installation about the connections between diaspora, family, memory, and the embodiment of nostalgia. 

Rowe has synthesized a time out of space in the gallery. Upon entry, one is faced with a room of all-enveloping darkness, lit only by the glow of a wooden cabinet filled with multiple Cathode Ray Tube televisions sets. The sofa is made of muted rose florals set atop a domestic floral rug. 

The video loops played on the TV sets feature footage of Barbadian people on the beach. The images are low res and grainy due to the format and medium. The people are viewed from a distance, bobbing on waves. Footage of waves lapping at the shore and brief clips of banana flowers and green bananas call upon the sense memory associated with days at the market. 

The intimate living space permits the viewer momentary childlike vulnerability, and taps into the collective childhood memories of gallery visitors. It is familiar yet simultaneously unfamiliar. It is a glance into Rowe’s inner world, while also dwelling in the collective memory of being small before a television.

These television screens tell entwining stories about the water and the land, and the intimate ways people connect to the waters. The water creates an embodied, diasporic connection between people and memory. 

The appearance of the banana flower is especially notable in this exhibition. While many Canadians are familiar with the banana fruit, the banana flower is a more unfamiliar form. With processing and consideration, the banana flower is also edible, a uniquely savoury but floral experience. Rowe’s art practice frequently references Caribbean foodways as a form of diasporic connection. The unfamiliarity of the banana flower also connects to Rowe’s otherness as a Black woman living in the system of Canadian white supremacy. 

On the waves of the Barbados coast, all things coalesce. People, food, memory, water, and land become one and the same. Allow yourself to be swept away at the Forest City Gallery.