Gouled Ahmed | Praise To the Godlands

“Praise To the Godlands” is a multimedia project that incorporates textile art, photography, performance, film, and poly-vocal sound art into its world-building. The work is centrally focused on creating a series of mixed-media tapestry works, primarily featuring the Macawis (sarong) textile. The project explores psycho-memorial, psycho-somatic, and psycho-spatial terrains. It investigates the choreographic registers of dispossession, elegiac forms of ritual making, mourning, and navigating geographies of loss. It looks at how we are able to map the histories of our dead through world-building, through myth-making, through sound and image. It looks at ways to honor the dead through tapestry-making and assemblage.

Gouled thinks of their textile sculptures as charting familial cartographies, cosmologies of belonging, of rupture and loss. They create tessellating poem maps navigating the uncharted terrain of their own family tree through the modes of familial ethnographic interventions, through the collection, digitization, and use of archival photos, letters, and cassette tapes, through refurbishing material heritage (textiles and jewelry) in order to make sense of the past and reimagine alternative futures. Their work explores cultural heritage, code-making, and inherited stories. It is concerned with chronologies of kinship and with the themes of re-memory, edited memory, and experimental bio-mythologies.

Gouled draws on the seminal works of Saidiya Hartman, thinking of how to incorporate ‘critical fabulation’ into their own world-building/making. They think of Glissant’s concept of ‘archipelagic thought’ when trying to piece, stitch together, and navigate the disparate stories of his ancestral past. How might we allow multiple and sometimes contradictory memories to co-exist?

Coming from cultures that are deeply patrilineal in their remembrances, Gouled’s work seeks to consider alternate forms of archiving; it seeks to de-center patriarchal power and center a femme-focused form of memory-making in the Horn of Africa. Gouled seeks to remember those people whose names and legacies are forgotten, rendered invisible. They center the stories of the othered in their own family to make monuments of them. Their work, in essence, is a litany of survival, centering on the unremembered and unrememberable. It survives on repetition, it survives on assigning meaning, healing, and care by resuscitating a wounded family tree. It survives on animating his dead, assigning them the dignity they deserved in this life, the remembrance that they were never afforded. Gouled seeks to chart and explore alternate epigenetic chronologies by bisecting archival colonial imagery with their own family’s photos to offer new life, new worlds for their dead. Their work bridges tools of testimony; Gouled creates as a means to remember.