Ama Josephine Budge
Spliced: An Obituary in Three Movements
‘Spliced: An Obituary in Three Movements’ is a visual and textual honouring of the unspoken human and non-human lives taken, displaced, misnamed and misremembered by colonial cultures of dispossession. Made to emulate a colonial Victorian Garden, living trophy cabinets for the horticultural spoils of war and occupation, the Sunken Garden offers a space of respite from the elements, both natural and historical. In such a space of rest and reflection, one might come to commune with the dead. Those named and honoured, as well as those obscured and displaced. This textual and visual ode / honouring seeks to name those stolen futures, creating a speculative ecology of healing, visioning and repair to haunt the sunny pathways that run parallel with horror. What rises up from a sunken garden, which voices clamour to speak? And how, amidst all the noise of our own forgetting, might we remember how to hear them?
Artwork by Ama Josephine Budge, in collaboration with Mohammed Z. Rahman.
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Biography
Ama Josephine Budge is a speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities.
www.amajosephinebudge.com
Mohammed Z Rahman is a British-Bengali writer, painter and illustrator based in East London. His work often deals with food, migration and gender. Mohammed’s literary output includes short stories, poetry and creative non-fiction, and his visual output includes illustration, painting and zines.
https://linktr.ee/mzrsupply
Credits
The artist wishes to thank her collaborator Mohammed Z. Rahman for their illustration work, Peter Hasted for his insights into the Sunken Garden’s histories and ecologies and the sculpting of ocean winds, and the plants themselves that both inspired and co-created this work. She hopes that they feel honoured.
