ft.

puntWG
May 2025

By hard experience they had learnt that isolated efforts were doomed to failure,
— C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

senakirfa A. & S*an D. Henry-Smith present new works in collaboration grounded in the poetics of hands and the logics of their phonic exchange. What precedes their collaboration is a shared collection of resonances kept in and held by poetry, field recordings, objects, and photographs.

  • 1 sound system, from which plays several sonic compositions now presented as one work—the first of which is a remixed recording of our first ritual of intuition in the gallery before opening to public during which we removed one-by-
    one, all of the materials we brought into the space, and then swept, dusted, and closed the windows and door. The piece includes several other sonic experiments using recordings of senakirfa’s voice as she practices Twi to explore drone, harmonics, and polyrhythm; 2 window frames complete with glass, painted white, and chipped from use and the passage of time;
  • 1 personal boombox, from which plays Nnwonkoro songs in Twi, performed by a group of people in Ghana. Certainly not the unscratched CD, perhaps the aging stereo; but I prefer to think that the singers themselves, the drummers’ collected palms, altogether interrupt the anthropological microphone, slurring and jolting the track into the haptics of polyrhythm and nonlinearity;
  • 11 plastic chairs of two sorts—6 are navy blue, 5 are dark green, with a perforated square resembling rattan skin, a familiar/izing object to our African and Caribbean heritages wherever they are now and however long they have been there, a site of leisure, harvest, sunsitting, gathering, contemplating;
  • 2 wooden table tennis paddles—one has 9 neon green plastic balls on elastic cords drooping from the center, the other has 1 such ball and cable on the bottom of the handle;
  • 1 string tied around 3 nails nailed into the wall—our guitar, when plucked;
  • 3 pieces of glass—one panel cut to the shape of a droplet that drips on both ends, one small square panel, slightly bigger than a sheet of paper, and a large rectangular panel of glass; and
  • 4 photographs—3 the size of drugstore prints, and like a sheet of paper
    • 1) taken by senakirfa as child, of her father’s torso and a globe turned to the continent of Africa,
    • 2) the largest at roughly A4, thorns and bramble piercing sharp from the green haze,
    • 3) a calisthenics set in lush green, appearing as something geometric, perhaps a system of lettering,
    • 4) my childhood home at sunset from the backyard, the windows of my former bedroom.