Yves François Wilson and Righteous Path on material, meaning, and memory:

ALEXIS ZANGHI: Can you tell us more about the show’s title, MATERIAL WITNESS?

YVES FRANÇOIS WILSON: So I really enjoy being able to play with words and their meaning and how loaded objects can be. 

Everything that we come across is loaded with history, even the words that we use, even the language that we're speaking now—everything that I come across in my daily life. In my work, I play with the everyday, and that includes language. And I think black folks in particular have a special relationship with language, where, you know, we’re playing with it. It can be a form of armor. It can be a form of a play. It can be a form of speaking over and under or, you know, within community. And same thing when it comes to our interactions with objects, especially with when it comes to maintaining story and a community that's rooted in the world, right?

There are traditions in holding objects and passing objects down, but for the most part, my history has been one of a passed down story. We have family members who are known for their yarns or stories, and we're not even sure which part is wholly true or not, even when it comes to records and families records…When I was younger, my mother and I used to really push for the family to genealogy projects, and it would always lead us back to going to someone's home and getting a story out of them, right. And there would be objects around the home that were used to tell the story, that were passed on.

My relationship with material has been that it’s a testimony, you know, that is used as proof of or foundation for story. But we don't need a material foundation for the story, the oral history— it's natural. And I just also wanted to play to something that speaks my relationship with the legal system here and in my relationship with it, particularly being in and out of the system before I found the arts. And also kind of hiding that because of the perception of it as well. And then my relationship with my family and their religious background as well.

So these communities and these objects and the images of these people that have formed my experiences are a testimony to our history and holding our history and keeping it alive, especially in one in the time that we're living now, especially where histories are being erased and not there's nobody fighting to keep these stories alive. So we actually now need material more than ever. So that's my concern right now, and that's why the title is ”material.”

RIGHTEOUS PATH: I was thinking about it as we are a spiritual witness: because we have spirits and then material witnesses. The photo is a material witness of what happened. I was very excited that it was a house—especially a house that looks this, a 200-year-old house because that's what I remember and where I remember all of the familial essence was built.

If we had all grown up where we are now—separated into the little cells that the economy has forced us into being—then we would never have the same bond that we have now. And I still go by that house all the time, it’s just this 200-year-old house. It's got the ceilings, the exposed beams, and the stucco; all the things that I feel have become the material witness.

Everybody's moving now. All the adults I know have a storage unit because they're constantly moving and being very choice as to what we're carrying with us and what we're making that preserve those remnants and so there's a collective call at the moment to really prioritize.

And with prioritizing those memories and what you choose to hold as the material witness to your existence, then you start to have to prioritize where you're taking your everything: I have to let go something of very serious and important now, I don't have time for games anymore because I had to let that shit go. Why? Because I had to move. So that’s kind of the statement for me. The material witness is reduced to whatever you can carry with you.

AZ: Do you find that sound has a material quality to it as well?

RP: Yes, in the worst way, because I always lose my files. [Laughs.] But because you also choose all the snippets and where they're from. I'm very choice because my brain is very attached to sounds: if you spend enough time around me, I guess, you'll hear me always making some type of sound. I don't know that's just because I'm generally nervous or it’s every moment calls something back, a big sound, But yeah, absolutely.

...In this realm, what you can hold on to is most dear to your heart. But also I think that the sound and images, those are the things that will stay in your brain, and if you focus hard enough, then you can recollect them. But material is more devastating, physical materials, because you can't hold on.

 YFW: I really wonder sometimes if I would be so concerned with holding down to objects, if I wasn't really concerned with erasure. And I really love tradition. I even love coming up with new traditions within my family and I'm still learning about my paternal side—my father I didn't really grow up with, he’s in Congo, and there are people that have passed and the only way I'm starting to learn about these people is through objects that were passed to me...I'm thinking about objects and tradition and dance and song and family traditions that were carried on—and they're able to recollect hundreds of years of history on call. And I'm jealous of that, to be honest…So that's, you know, kind of something that pushes me to actually think about media. But, I mean, even in art school—I went to school for photo, but I still was not about just being, you know, having photography be the only thing that could that I could express an idea through. I'm just trying to figure out what is, what's the best way to communicate this idea, you know what I mean? And when it comes to memory, it’s anything is up for grabs.