Berette S Macaulay

“The West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place.”
—Edouard Glissant

In the video work Metamorphic Return, Berette S Macaulay seeks to tether her particular transcultural and transnational identity while holding larger questions about belonging, historical displacement, exile, surveillance, and self-invention. Using interdisciplinary modes of practice, she explores assertive yet abstract expressions of il/legibility as tools of agency for “Other-ed people,” she says.

Macaulay embodies her mythic characters as traveling shrouds, which appear in shifting landscapes and shorelines, drawing from cultural markers of Mende secret societies in Sierra Leone, where the artist was born. In those societies, she says, “signifiers of shapeshifting allow freedom of movement undetected in space and time.”

“Mas(querade) culture conjures ancestral memory of unknown kin,” Macaulay continues. It is also a nod to Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, which considers the “right to opacity”—essentially, the right to mystery and use of coded connection.

“Western systems require explanations for existence,” Macaulay says, “only for such nuanced complexities of personhood to be flattened by racialized categories, persecuted belief systems, or the ascriptions given to exiled beings: alien, asylee, immigrant, migrant, refugee, terrorist. Unidentified movement through unidentified spaces challenges ascriptions of homemaking in third-worlding-horizons; it addresses the ongoing paradox of desiring to be seen while choosing il/legibility to be liberated and whole.”

Performers:
Berette S Macaulay, Francheska Alcantara, Jordan Isaacs

Script, Sound Compositions, and Direction:
Berette S Macaulay

Videography assistance + creative development support:
Dale P. Woodard, David Gumbs, Ebony G. Patterson, Jordan Isaacs, and William Richards

Thanks to:
Land steward and artist communities in all locations where this work was filmed between 2017 – 2024; and to Centrum Residencies, Tables of Contents Residency at Glynwood, Vermont Studio Center, and Visit SL for project development support.

Full Project Locations:
Brazil (Salvador + Rio de Janeiro), France (Normandy), Italy (Trieste, Venice), Jamaica (Kingston and St. Thomas), Hawai’i and North America (Washington State, Vermont), Sierra Leone (Freetown, Bunce Island, Bureh Beach)

About the Artist

Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary artist and writer with practices in photography, mixed media, video, performance, and sculpture. She is currently exhibiting work in My Oma (Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands), and CONTINUITY (National Gallery of Jamaica), with installations forthcoming at 2024 Walk the Block with Wa Na Wari. Recent residencies and grant support include Tables of Contents at Glynwood, Vermont Studio Center, National Performance Network, DVCAI/Hambidge, and CENTRUM. Macaulay was the Curatorial Fellow at On the Boards for UN-[TITLED], a project addressing gentrification histories and community resistance stories in Seattle, and a University of Washington Ottenberg-Winans Fellow for Embodied Witness, her ongoing research on diasporic Afro-gestural vocabularies and community performance. She served as Guest Curator for the 2024 Jacob Lawrence Gallery Legacy Residency Program and is founder/lead organizer for Black Cinema Collective (BCC), a project of her collaborative arts incubator, i•ma•gine | e•volve.