Meditation: Costa Del Alma

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Makeda Thomas in collaboration with Panu Kari
Costa Del Alma (2008)
Large projection  / 7 minutes 14 sec. / Lighting: Camal Gaiby/Music: “Om Mani Padme Hum” by Yungchen Lhamo

“She who knows she cannot speak of them without speaking of herself, of history without involving her story, also knows that she cannot make a gesture without activating the to and fro movement of life.”

-Trinh T. Minh-ha, Not You/Like You

Costa del Alma is a meditation of overlapping metaphors in which there are multiple planes of time, place and space.  This work is at once a study in video, a remembrance of a 2008 visit to Costa do Sol and of my paternal grandmother (whose name is Alma), and an interplay between Portuguese, Spanish and English words.

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I had a vision. A vision that began with the sound of the name of a place, Costa do Sol.  Past, present and future. I remember my grandmother Alma, Soul - beautiful, creative, and fiercely independent, but whose memory is haunted by the image of her floating in muddied waters. I remember Augusto - wanting to wash away the images of his death from the memory of all who loved him, and yet wanting to always, always remember.  I remember beautiful haunting memories. Standing there, in the vastness of the Indian Ocean – I heard only the running wind. I could see no one. No thing. This is where the work began.

Let’s just go there. Coast of the Soul. I remember that my collaborator, Finnish video artist Panu Kari, wanted a ’story’ beyond the simple, elemental images of floating, walking, running, mud, of the rhythm of the senses, and all the convergent metaphors.  Panu’s thoughts on the method:

“Agua… Makeda as a physical appearance…Hair like ropes, skinny…big lips, water - eyes, open and closed. Seeing in two dimensions. Method: associative, improvising… jazz. Basic images, then associating. Mud, sand. Water, skin. Floating objects. Beauty of images as content. Even a cliche. Let the beauty take over. We were getting started…”

Christopher Cozier, visual artist and writer also on the editorial collective of Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism observed that,

“As a person who grew up here in the 60’s and 70’s etc..it carries certain tropes for example the beach, black woman, water, horizon line, expanse/open space, white flowing cotton robes and dreads, boat, running all as interwoven signs…The big question is how to really own this visual vocabulary personally and to which audience it is pitched.” 

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Consider that Costa Del Alma inverts and reverts within dual spaces that oscillates around the questions of: 1) How does the work resist being identified by cliché, tropes already embodied in the rules of identity? and 2) How would the work live in a space where those processes are not engaged?

“One’s sense of self is always mediated by the image one has of the other.”

Shifting reflexivities are thus, proposed within the work’s own visual language. Costa Del Alma is in a way, self-referential, circulatory, paradoxical, more prismatic than “kaleidescopic,” within a fragmented spatiality, forwards and backwards in my-story, in a story with no beginning or end…In motion. Here is where the work began.

The writing of the film’s ’story’ happened during the recording and editing.  Panu’s reflections about the later editing process:

“In the editing, I try to do violence to my previous plans. I try to twist it around… to turn off the rational thought. It liberates me to listen to the material. Possible “stories” or texts are various. This is one, maybe the only one possible at given time and place.”

Panu’s liberation, the turning “off” of rational thought, was recognized when the haunting “floating objects” of beauty transferred to the “raw stuff, the ugly stuff where you are out of role, you are the reflector.”  Out of role, our collaboration could move through a sequence of symbols that evoked a ’story’ we already knew, further into an imagining of the spaces beyond this knowledge. In vertigo, in the re-ordering of balance within the body’s (the film’s) visual and aural (oral) systems (the familiar and iconic), and sense of where it is in (specific) spaces (proprioception), we began a re-imagining and re-contextualization of the film, manifesting its logic and alchemy.  What can be learned here about the agency of the body in space?

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In November 2008, Costa Del Alma was presented in the Meditation Chapel at Hollins University for the 41st Congress on Research in Dance (CORD).  Held alongside the 15th Fall Dance Gathering, CORD explored questions like:  How has a resistant feminine space been created and sustained within the uneven terrain of spaces flattened by the market forces of globalization? What does that space look like, how does it feel?  How are feminist concerns constructed within Dance Studies?  What can Dance Studies do in relation of the space of a global feminine?

Costa Del Alma was fully realized, in true form, within the scale of the large projection, methodology of the Meditation Chapel and within the context of “Dance Studies and Global Feminisms,” and presented with possibilities distinct from earlier showings of work at BRIC Arts|Media|Brooklyn (30 May 2008) and MadLab Theatre’s First International Film Festival in Columbus, Ohio (8 November 2008). Thomas DeFrantz, CORD Conference Co-Chair and Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the work’s contribution to the discussion of a “resistant feminine space of dance studies”:

“Imagery of a powerful woman at rest, adrift, floating, at full run; with the mud of the land impressed onto her face; immersed in water suggest shifting contingencies of being. Because the work was shown in a meditation space, we wonder at the extended temporality suggested by the limited action of the short film.  In claiming this time and (literal) space, we are invited to transport ourselves to another place to consider a feminine that colludes with the masculinist cinema only to explode its core value of fragmentation with imagery of a dancer’s potent presence.”

The film was also discussed in Jeffrey Bullock’s Hollins University undergraduate art and performance seminar, “Art and Performance as a Way to Inhabit the World: The Unmade Projects.”  The student’s awareness of temporality and “shifting contingencies” was evidenced in a conceptual shift from visual light to lightness of mas(s), “myriad lights – the white dress, the light of nature, the lightness in floating in water, to the lightness of running.”  Ideas were presented about distance - from how the project developed with large distance between the collaborators (New York/Trinidad and Mozambique/Finland), to the erasure of that circumscription through media and technology, to the sensing of “isolation” and “mourning (which presents other kinds of distances) in the way you wiped the mud on your face, as the ancient Israelis” (time).

One young woman commented, ”watching you put the mud on your face was really uncomfortable.”  This echoed one of the film’s working images:  mud and J’ouvert - “unconstrained, unregulated and not commercialised. Without the ugly contrast of J’ouvert we cannot fully recognise the beauty of Carnival.”   Here is again, a reversal of the haunting floating objects of beauty transferred to the raw stuff, the ugly stuff.  I consider how this settles in the conversations on beauty, on beautiful people, beautiful places like the Caribbean, or on the gaze within the context of a culture where to be with someone physically is to “look for” that person, or where “seen” means overstanding, on converging histories.

“The eyes blinking a un-continuous but fast rhythm, creates a feeling of electric shocks in the memory,”  and along with counterpoint and syncopation (time created and transformed) recorded the feeling of memory, of living and dying, appearing, disappearing, holding a space, dissolving. Costa Del Alma thus began and continues its motion of creating multiple spaces of reflection; living spaces of meditation - on time, place, and space; on visual narrative, beauty, death, water; spaces where “the future just like the past would be present before its eyes”.  Processes in motion and through this collaboration, these and other conversations have been the springboard into new interactions with the work.  Here, in this to and fro movement, is where the work began.

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1. Crapanzano Vincent, 1985 ‘A Reporter at Large’ (New York: New Yorker 18 March 8-10)
2. See “E-natomy of a Collaboration”, a series of emails between Makeda Thomas and Panu Kari on the development of ‘Costa Del Alma’.
3. See “E-natomy of a Collaboration”
4. Wendell Manwarren in J’ouvert’s Primal Call. Melissa Dassrath.  Trinidad & Tobago Newsday. Sunday, February 3 2008.
5. See “E-natomy of a Collaboration”
6. Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, Introduction. 1814.

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