The rise and soar of Julianknxx: “How do I carry all my histories with me without negating who I am?”

“You can’t think of breakdancing the same way after seeing this video. It’s in the blood, it’s in the DNA.” Sierra Leonean poet and filmmaker Julianknxx exclaims as we talk at his studio on The Strand, London. We’ve spent the last few minutes hunched over a phone screen perusing his saved Instagram posts in search of gnosis, of lost vibes, of latent memories. Our latest discovery, 1950s archival footage of a Nigerian masquerade, depicts what could be described in Western parlance, as ‘an early form of breakdancing’. It’s at once riveting and distressing to reflect on how these gestures travelled across time and the Atlantic Ocean, remaining dormant and re-emerging through New York’s B-Girl/B-Boy culture of the late ‘60s. This revelation appears in accordance with what Black feminist theorist Tina Campt aptly labels “Black countergravity”: fabulation rendered through the Black body itself, and its extraordinary capacity to manifest something. The notion defies the physics of anti-blackness that has historically sought to expunge Black life.

Julianknxx’s latest work Chorus in Rememory of Flight, currently on view at the The Curve gallery in London’s Barbican Centre, is preoccupied with this understanding of Black diasporic cultures as enduring bricolages, positioning Africa as their source. Through explorations of the quotidian, the multi-channel video installation reconsiders the Black histories of nine European port cities − Lisbon, Hamburg, Berlin, Marseille, Antwerp, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and London. “I’m trying to find out how far back in the blood memory can go and affect how we move now,” he explains.  A diasporan himself, having fled the Sierra Leonean civil war in the ‘90s and settling in London as a teenager, Julianknxx is all too familiar with the peculiarities of exilic living. “As members of the diaspora, how do we think about our own rites of passage and rituals, jumping off what’s there but not holding on to it, not letting it define us? I can’t mimic what we do back home, but I can find my own language for doing that, and in that space the possibilities are endless,” he says.

There is a musicality to the flow of Julianknxx’s films, a tenderness towards Black life and an honesty in their depictions of the legacies of colonialism. Though immersed in the world of image-making, Julianknxx’s creative universe is rooted in poetry and an impulse to write; deployed as a means to conjure, critique and form new ways of seeing. When questioned about his artistic journey thus far, he responds: “My aim was to quit my job and become a poet”. His earliest engagements with poetry were through the Bible which cemented within him a particular reverence for the psalms. “I’m always thinking about how we can move everyday language into a spiritual space,” he says.

On the table between us is a plethora of books, among them is Lorna McDaniel’s The Big Drum Rituals of Carriacou: Praise Songs in Rememory of Flight, a key piece of literature which served as a theoretical guide for Julianknxx. “I just loved how she used flight as a metaphor to engage with everyday practice, everyday thinking,” he recalls. “She immersed herself in big drum rituals in Carriacou and traced them back to Africa. In the book, McDaniels sketches out different types of flight: the rebellious spiritual flight from enslavement and its final flight in suicide, the artistic dream-inspired flight of ritual dance, the spiritual flight of religious ecstasy and the compositional flight which creates a historical musical legacy. Through the film, I was looking at physical flight, how we move using water or air and spiritual flight, the things that we’ve carried with us: the songs, the music, the way we gather.” Other key literary references for the exhibition include Paule Marshall’s Praise Songs For The Widow and Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self Regard. Julianknxx expresses a great deal of gratitude for the works of these artists.

However, he acknowledges there will always remain a through-line connecting these practices back to Africa: “How do I carry all my histories with me without negating who I am?”, he ponders. “As a filmmaker, I look and I engage. Rather than just presenting people, I also risk myself in this space. None of us know where we are, we’re finding it as we go along. I’m being held and carried, and I’m carrying others too. There’s this quote from Chinua Achebe: ‘The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place’. I don’t want to say this was all borrowed from African American traditions, for me, my starting point would be the way Chinua Achebe writes.”