in the belly.
in the belly (2025)
Cyanotype + hand-embroidery on cotton (3 panels of 250 cm x 38 cm)
and audio-recorded poetry.
EXHIBITION
Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art
New Bedford Whaling Museum
22 May 2024
“In the wake, the semiotics of the slave ship continue…”
Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness & Being
This audio and visual installation commemorates the complex relationship the Cape Verdean diaspora has had with the idol of ‘the ship’. ‘The ship’ and its hierarchy have long been the ultimate symbol of Modernity, and this work takes us through the diaspora’s historical, material and spiritual connections to this construction. As a spatio-temporal matrix ‘the ship’ has shape shifted over the centuries, yet remained all the same. We are collectively still stuck on it.
One. This is a space to grieve our ancestors in the belly of ‘the slave ship’, still fuelling our very worship of Capital. Along ‘the slave ship’s’ agonising paths, too many of ours suffocated in that wooden hold, too many succumbed in that saltwater graveyard overboard, and yet all were accompanied by our mammalian ancestors. Our whale kin, joint in our abilities to breathe within unfathomable circumstances. As our worlds collided - ‘the slave ship’ and ‘the whale ship’ were carefully interchanged.
Two. This is a space to reconcile the belly of ‘the whale ship’, now fuelling Great Western Industrialisation. As our Cape Verdean forbearers clandestinely entered these ships, moved up the chain- up to deck, and eventually captaining its helms. They retrieved their own stories of survival on at sea as they could not breathe on dry land. There on the decks, above the sperm whale’s punctured lung, where the winds could reach- finally the sigh of relative release.
Three. This is a space to honour the shipwrecks that fed the bellies of our island elders, starved in the last century. As the twist of fate, an emergent world kicked back and ‘the shipwreck’ at Praia Formosa bestowed life’s gift upon them back then. Could this kind of mutiny have a purpose for us today?
As I seek to touch through the tides of time.
May we experience the death rattle of Modernity,
may we have the courage to jump ship.
* in the belly is part of Janilda Bartolomeu‘s whaling trilogy’ consisting of artworks situated in the triangular territory between the United States (in the belly), The Azores (learning how to breathe) and Cabo Verde (t.b.a.). learning how to breathe (2025) is a sonic artwork, about mammalian kinship, grief and our collective respiratory systems, which opened with a public performance during the Walk & Talk Biennial in November 2025.