Singing Water Stone

What exists between here and there, between this reality and the Spirit World, can sometimes feel like an unbridgeable expanse. At times, the veil that separates us appears thicker, reducing our capacity to sense our loved ones’ presence as strongly as we might in times of heightened need or during ceremony. And so, we hold close reminders of those we long to see again: small tokens and treasures they once held, portraits, or moments they captured themselves. These objects offer comfort, keeping bonds taut and tangible in our hands and on our bedside tables. 

For Inuk/Haitian/Taíno artist and mother Siku Allooloo, storytelling honours these bonds, building a kind of filmic talisman that can be watched again and again. The act of making—of opening up our inner world through our hands and our imaginations—and the carrying out of ceremony are very closely connected. Making in honour of our ancestors is a form of ritual: to make is to remember, to remember is to reach out, and in reaching we call for their return. For Allooloo, art practice and spiritual practice are very much intertwined; art-making is culturally a life-way. Described by Allooloo as a “cinematic opening prayer,” her short film Spirit Emulsion honours her family and culture, commemorating her mother, Taíno activist Marie-Hélène Laraque, through a thoughtful, poetic offering.

Allooloo processes strips of film by hand with an eco-based developer, a gentler technique that activates vitamin C, washing soda, water, and plant material in place of industrial chemicals. Here land and lineage meet, with the same flowers used to develop the film overlaying her mother’s photograph. An analogue portrait requires that the light that grazes the subject bounces to the camera at the moment of capture, producing the image. The light is shared; a part of the subject’s essence is forever held within the film strip. Allooloo builds on this indexical relationship by reproducing her mother’s portrait on Super 8mm film, building a cinegraphic palimpsest, referencing the generational cycles of women in her family. Handprocessing allows Allooloo to mark the images with her own presence, leaving chemical traces of her body’s motion as she processed the film. It is a kind of darkroom magic, massaging one’s energetic signature into the emulsion, with the resulting tints and textures governed equally by chance and expertise. Handprocessing involves a lot of trust, especially when using a non-traditional developer. One must approach the process carefully, and with an openness to many potential outcomes. There is a notion that the film is therefore imbued with the intention of its maker, in this case with all of Siku’s love and admiration for her mother.

 The final result is a sacred object in and of itself, a one-of-a-kind lens-based talisman. Spirit Emulsion’s ceremonial power to honour and to remember is activated and illuminated with each and every flicker of the projector.