Myths & Migrations

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• Myths & Migrations
• Leronn P. Brooks and William Villalongo

This conversation was held in preparation for the artist's solo exhibition Myths & Migrations, opening at Grinnell Museum in January 2024.

WV:

this is an image of my sculpture Beacon installed at Villa Romana for Black History Month Florence.

I expanded on the central hanging piece that has gourds, seashells, and mineral stones on gold chains. I was trying to take advantage of the full space of this glass pavilion. In this iteration, the piece has sound. I collaborated with another fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Igor Santos. He pulls in sounds from all types of places to make his compositions. We got to talking about the idea of the nocturne after I explained to him that I think about the drinking gourd as a kind of way finder and its connection to the Big Dipper constellation through American folk song. The components of the piece are covered with black velvet to conjure the feeling of looking at the night sky. He started talking, explaining the nocturnes genre in classical music, which I didn't know much about. So he gave me a few things to listen to. Then we recorded some sounds in a park at dusk. He had all these high-powered mics, mics that can pick up vibrations and subtle things. Like the crunching of leaves under your feet. Some could record underwater. He mixed the sounds we found, and eventually I outfitted one of the gourds with a speaker that plays a conch call. Igor's mix of our found sounds come through two speakers at either side of the space. It's like an invocation of night. So the idea is to be immersed in sound from this beacon. A beacon for the diaspora. The object [End Page 177]

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William Villalongo, Beacon, 2022. Velvet flocking, gold chains, drinking gourds, Testa di Moro, artificial basil, obsidian, quartz, hematite, sea shells, and coral. 96 × 24 × 24 in. Copyright: the artist. Photograph courtesy of Villa Romana in Florence, Italy and ©Villalongo Studio LLC.

[End Page 178] evokes that folk song "Follow the Drinking Gourd." I also used a kitsch testa di moro, which is a folk craft in Sicily. It hangs upside down with a basil plant. I don't know if you've seen these …

LB:

Um, the Blackamoor?

WV:

Well, similar. Testa di moro is just a head and it's a planter vase. Traditionally it's a white female or a Black male.

LB:

Oh! Yes, yes.

WV:

The whole story is eleventh century. The Moors have conquered Italy and Sicily. A Moorish prince catches the eye of a Sicilian woman, they fall in love, and long story short, she finds out that he has a wife and children and he needs to go back home. After their last night of making love, she chops off his head and she plants basil in it. And strangely, it's the basil, not the severed head, that everyone finds remarkable. The basil is growing so well that this practice of having a head of a Moor on your balcony for growing basil begins. With all the incredible violence and gore the image implies, Sicily really identifies itself visually with testa di moro craft. You can find them everywhere!

LB:

Yeah, it's like the ways in which people seed reality with imagination. Why is all this basil around here? Well, it grew out of a Black man's head—it's magical realism. There is no abrupt separation between fact or fiction. There's something magical about that, to be in the eleventh century, this whole idea of origin, these two fell in love. It's almost biblical or something. It intersects with the kinds of magical spawning you create, (if I could put it that way) the generative elements in your work.

WV:

Well, one of the reasons why I wanted to work in Rome was to understand a deeper sense of time in relation to Black presence and how that span of time is being processed by scholars. From the Classics and medieval scholars I talk...