File Note 159: Ain Bailey

2026
If diaspora are social and psychic formations constituted and lived in difference and hybridity; composing and encompassing fragile subjects, with porous identities – always in process-of-becoming; affectively embodying desire and memory in non-linear temporality and kaleidoscopic spatiality: how does it feel in the sense of touch and sensation? How can it be touched/how does it touch its subjects? What are its frequencies and rhythms? What are its evocations (calling outs) and its invocations (calling ins)? Its process of re-memory?

Ain Bailey’s The Jamaica Project leads us into a space of visual, sonic, haptic exploration of all this and more.

A wedding photo album transmorphs into a video (Untitled: Our Wedding) (2022), where a note, a chord stammers and repeats and opens a portal into an intergenerational discovery and embrace of the felt but unknown worlds that are the sites/scenes of our individual and collective emergence. An ‘unthought known’4 beginning to be given symbolic expression and affective resonance. Souls seeking and haunted, expressed in vibration and echo.

1959
A child. A Black girl. Maybe four or five years old. She looks directly to camera. There seems to be a sadness in her eyes. A sense of slight discomfort. She holds a posy. Perhaps because an adult has instructed her to do this. Perhaps as transitional object 5 – transitional between her and the world. A white headdress crowns her head and accentuates the fact that her parting is not perfectly straight. She is perfect. The vibration in our hearts tells us as the sound hums in drone and note.

2026
The national lurks here but diffracted through the vibration of diasporic imagination that fashions the artefacts brought into communion as The Jamaica Project. This is a national made uncanny. A portal of symbols of ackee, Jamaica’s national fruit – patterning the windows, sculptures hanging from the ceiling, vocalisations of thrill and despair in Elaine Mitchener’s re-coding of Linstead Market. This diasporic practice and sensibility of ackee representation signals both a site of start-from (not security of known origin) and a process of transposition, which work to disrupt any nationalist rendering of the national – any sharp division of here/there: now/then. Stuart Hall told us that diasporic imagination is site and ‘source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery’6, so the ‘Jamaica’ rendered here is a Jamaica of anterior re-memory that refuses a frozen national as ethno-national ‘homeland’ and invites us into a haptic journey pulsating with quiet feeling and sonic vibration. Here ackee, as symbol of unattainable ‘return’, memory, connection in the ‘diaspora space’7 of London, is also an invocation – a calling-in to touch and feel the emotional and physical labours of a woman as she carries her ackee to market on a Sat’day night in hopes of selling enough to feed her children. But like diaspora itself, this is not one dimensional, and the stutter of ‘Sat’day night’ produces a doubleness in its ‘feel-up, feel-up’, a hint of jump-up and party subtended, up-close and haptically, by a woman’s multiple labours: physical in the picking and carrying and laying and displaying; sonic in the appeal to potential buyers where ‘feel-up, feel-up’ translates into ‘finger and bruise a woman’s fruit’ and maybe her body. Where to carry is the weight of the fruit, the weight of responsibility in conditions of empty belly and empty purse. The weight of dispossession.

2025
Arrival. Car journey. The travel is toward interiority and return. The electronic echoes and dub of bass signal heart and pulse of re-memory of first-time arrival. Cock crows announce it as both return and first arrival.

Movement between mountains, right, sea, left. Navigation between inscriptions of state-organised life as it collides with life otherwise, configured as cultural form – dance, music, food.

Bells tinkle in gesture of call to attend and gentle welcome.

Joe Gibbs Town Hall! Loudness and hectic vibrations of the clashes of urban life. Vehicular noises, cartwheels on asphalt, pedestrians and bicycles; heavy, sweet fragrances of fruit: banana, guinep, orange, tomato.

The car keeps moving. The journeying still in process, just as the becoming.

Pink, Pink Sky – soars and scratches into sonic view.

1959 – 2025
We move in sonic echo in the reverberations across the sound as the two films speak – nay, vibrate – the entanglement of Brixton and Jamaica. The textures, hard and soft, human and more-than-human, mark the embodiment of this entanglement, not just in what we see and hear but in how this reverberates – through you, me – as viewers-become-participants in the viewing/receiving of these works. Reverberations not in sense of direct repeats but in the ‘felt sounds’ 11 that result from the vibrations emanating from the close-ups of details – a button; a section of lace; a white-gloved hand; a section of cornice; a shoed foot; a glimpsed hoarding or health advisory ad; the suggestion of sex in wedding and an ad for PrEP for HIV; sport layered upon the carceral in ‘Spanish Town Prison Oval: Home of the National Premier League’. The bike rider that passes, the dog alongside, a smile, eye-to-camera/eye-to-eye – that land on the body, invite an ‘embrace of a different understanding of “sound”’12, as portal into the diasporic worlds of Ain Bailey, her co-creatives, and, perhaps, our own, and dwell in the space of diaspora that as Tina Ramnarine 13 tells us is the beingness of multiple attachments and lived homes negotiated through cultural practice.

It is spatial, temporal, psychic journey to be navigated. A way to be found.

2025
Wayfinder. Bike rider and repeated electronic note that rises and echoes converge to guide. Inward and outward wayfinder. Like Nanny and her maroon community, the journey is always-in-process movement towards Black self-possession – the finder signals and starts the way. The rising, repeated electronic note invokes and evokes this maroon haunting before the symphony of bird and insect call startles upon its arrival. There is an unsettling.

Bass line re-enters – regrounds.

Clouded mountainside in shadow and sun. Textures of green and sacking-coloured earth.

Leaves. Dance and twist in concert with wind. White cloud glides across dark grey hilltops and multitextured foliage. Auburn tree trunk exposed by abandonment of leaf, bursts into view.

Leaves. Flowing movement: felt but unseen presence hiding in leaf. Echo of history and time. Refusal and rebellion and makers of freedom.

A daughter re-turns – is touched, sees, sonically inhabits all that is there to be felt – names unknown.

2026
If these are rendered as movement, what of the moments of stillness? The quiet that roars off the image of a face in a Brixton street or a leaf on a Blue Mountain hillside?

2025
Water. Sounds. Drops. Submerged accentuates. Fractures. Gurgles. Resounds. Carries. Pulses. Taps. Gathers. Sounds. Water.

Travels inside head, bounces between eardrums which tremble – gently. Inside summoning those under the water, interred in the earth. Water. Sounds. Stutters. Clings. Grates. Inside upon a land hailed always-already in a London summer of 1959.

Disoriented by beauty and haunting.

Bass line brings relief and orientation again.

Orientation toward a meeting in place and body.

5C Jacques Road: Part One carries memory and trace. And women other than Nanny show their imprint and point the way. Edna Manley via her Negro Aroused sculpture of 1935. Black self-possession again.

And political connection – 15A Jacques Road is now the Amy Jacques Garvey Community Centre. Geography ties. Time connects: 1930s Amy Jacques Garvey lives for a brief time in Fulham in the 1930s, six miles from the place of a Jamaican Brixton wedding in 1959.

Black life in spiral manifestation. End and start just turns on the spiral.

Crosswalks conjuring crossroads.