Chronicling the rituals of how we welcome the dead across water and worlds, in a praxis of memorying the things that do not register, the silences in the archive, the unspoken, the unnamed
Catching Shadow, a film collaboration between documentarian and multimedia artist, Tamika Galanis, poet and performance artist Charlotte Henay, and Princess Pratt, cultural worker
art | @chancemutuku
Charlotte Henay is a Bahamian diasporic teller
Her work is rooted in restorative practice, story as relationality, Black feminist spiritwork and tending grief.
She listens to the plants, and is a student of dreamwork, shamanic practices for healing and divination, and ancestral practices as pathways into knowledge keeping, memories and shape shifting. Charlotte poets, does multidisciplinary making and scholaring. Her work in poetic form is about the process of talking with the dead and, through that, confronting and transforming absences for healing and remembrance.
Charlotte has advanced training in literary and cultural studies, and Sociology in Education, and trending grief. She holds a Phd from York University, and has trained as a death doula, a restorative practice practitioner, a community herbalist, and is currently engaged in advanced spirit work training with the Foundation of Shamanic Studies.
Henay’s writing has been published in Canada and internationally, in literary magazines (ROOM, ARC, The Offing) and academic journals (RACAR, The Canadian Theatre Review, CPI), and her multidisciplinary work exhibited at the Nasher Museum, National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, conferences and galleries in New York City, Miami and Toronto. She is a recovering academic.
Current Work
All of My People’s Bones Are Here asks whether troubling intracolonial/intracommunity boundaries and multidisciplinary practices recenters colonial qualifications of indigeneity and blackness. It is organized around the questions of what liminal praxes may tell us about memorying and archives at the interstices of blackness and indigeneity; what are the major impetuses to Afro-Indigenous politics of imagining? I am curious about how we might acknowledge a practice of visual referencing through which we converse with spirit – always to the epiphenomenal moment.