With American Gurl: home–land, Black Filmmakers Usher In A Reckoning Of Displacement And Belonging

At Los Angeles’ MOCA culture:LAB, an exhibit and program series centering women filmmakers creates a timely and needed conversation around home, diaspora, and belonging. Womxn in Windows/ American Gurl: home–land contemplates these ideas through the lenses of several filmmakers such as Raven Jackson, Solange Knowles, and more. 

Brought to fruition by curators Zehra “Zehra Zehra” Ahmed, and Kilo Kish, home–land disrupts the contemporary art space by finding “connections and commonalities that deepen our understanding of the world around us and our sense of self.” The two curators first came together in 2020, leading Zehra to curate Kish’s American Gurl videos: “In learning more about the concepts Kish was investigating through her American Gurl album, I felt there was so much to be further explored. I have personally always been fascinated by the idea of the American girl, as I feel it has and continues to inform such a large part of popular culture around the globe. This felt like the perfect opportunity to turn that fascination and questioning into a curatorial project with someone who was American and had started the process already,” Zehra shares. 

Each iteration of American Gurl follows a different theme, reflective of the concepts that feel most relevant to the curators lives at the time. With home–land, the artists contemplate the feeling of home and their connections to the earth. In terms of bringing the elements together, the curators start researching with a wide net, prioritizing “fresh stories and perspectives by women that go unheard or unseen,” and allow “the show [to reveal] itself” intuitively. Their hopes in bringing this collection of works to fruition is for witnesses to welcome the differences of experiences, and for young people to be inspired to create through the digital arts. 

Rather than needing the films to explicitly connect to one another, the curators allow them to exist as is, underneath the overall concept of “home –land.” 

“For me, they’re not all always in conversation with each other. There may be one or two that play off each other more. I think the films and performances we choose provide nuance around the concepts at hand,” Kish explains.

The full exhibition features the visual works of Solange Knowles, Melvonna Ballenger, Shenny De Los Angeles, Ella Ezeike, Alima Lee, and Cauleen Smith. Within their films, these women are inviting audiences to contemplate connections to land through their own world views, through depicted relationships both fictional and nonfictional, ancestral and spiritual traditions passed down within lineages, and how connections to certain lands and spaces can shape identity. 

In addition to the physical exhibit which runs through May 4th, the curators brought in Raven Jackson for a special screening of her award-winning feature film, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.” 

Jackson’s film, produced by A24 and Berry Jenkins, is set in rural Mississippi and centers the lives of Black women as they experience life through girlhood, aging, motherhood, love and loss. After the screening, Jackson sat with Kish and Zehra to discuss how the film came about and answer questions around her process and intentions. 

They discussed Jackson’s personal connection to water, a salient element throughout the film,  through her Tenneseean childhood and family fishing traditions, and how her love for hands and movement shaped many of the intimate exchanges within the story. Jackson also took particular care to discuss her understanding of time, the nonlinear way her characters’ lives unfold, and how the fluidity of time as she depicts it through the intimate spaces of Black life is in tune with grander understandings of nature.

In a separate conversation with Jackson, she tells AFROPUNK how integral connecting with the earth is to her creative process. Both the contents of her film, and the realities of her work as a filmmaker, align with the elements the exhibit sought to center.

“I was interested in making a film that absolutely explored the life of a Black woman in Mississippi, and allowed seemingly mundane moments to exist on the same plane and have the same amount of importance as ones we deem as very profound — like the loss of a family member. [I wanted to] allow these things to coexist in the same film and give equal weight to both of them, showing the many colors of a life in a fluid, watery way.” 

“When we found Roseville Church in Vicksburg, Mississippi, it’s such a special location surrounded by nature and farm animals, I just knew there’s no way I’m letting this church go. There’s a wedding and a funeral scene in the film, and they want to be filmed here. I just knew it.” Jackson discusses the more intuitive decisions made in constructing the film, which in many ways leaned on the earth and her own spiritual connection to it, to bring the story to life. As a part of her directorial process, it’s important for her to take solitary time between takes, to “tune in,” especially in nature. Constructing a story so steeped in the natural world offered ample opportunity for this, and allowed her to further connect with her ancestral land of Mississippi.

“My mother is from Mississippi, about 45 minutes away from Vicksburg, and things unfold in a way you could never plan for it, but it ends up being exactly what needed to happen. It just felt like I needed to be having a conversation with my own lineage as I’m making this film. We invited a lot of people from the communities we filmed in to actually be a part of the film in ways, and I’m grateful for that aspect because I felt like that’s what I needed to deepen my relationship with not only Mississippi, but the story and these characters.”

She focuses on the decision behind leaning less on dialogue, and more on the physical communication brought forth by body language, silence, and the sounds of nature. “I have a deep reverence for nature; I don’t see myself as separate, but a part of it. I wanted to make a lot of space for nature to be a living character in this film too,” she explains. Many elements of the film, such as certain exchanges between young sisters or the tradition of eating clay passed down from grandmother to granddaughters, were organic evolutions that came to as the story developed. 

In discussing the spiritual, yet complicated relationship diasporic Black people have with the lands they come from, inhabit, and look after, Jackson shares that these beautiful and complicated experiences need not be looked at separately. “It’s about embracing the complexity of it all, not making something only one thing, but allowing it to be and to wrestle with that.”

With the existence of the home–land exhibit, Jackson believes Zehra and Kish are making space for all of these complexities to be heard and experienced on a larger scale. “It’s offering a real life to works that deserve to be seen, first and foremost, but also seen in a communal space.” Taking her film into consideration, she expresses gratitude for the ability to grant it another chapter in time, as it was originally released January 2023. 

In context with the exhibit’s other films, Jackson feels as if each body of work is “circling the same thoughts” of time, land stewardship, and connection to earth and self in a variety of ways.

Zooming out, the contemplation of home, belonging, and diaspora feels all the more poignant now, as xenophobic attacks and displacement continue to threaten freedom and autonomy on a global scale. As the two curators highlight for us, it is important to remember these connections to home and the spaces we occupy on this earth, especially as we expand into the future and many of these elements get lost in translation. 

Kish sees the need to, “find that sense of groundedness in remembering our roots and connection to the planet.” Zehra contemplates the pattern of global movement, both forced and at will, and how it can exacerbate a “disconnection between ourselves, those around us and the earth we inhabit. Being reminded to care for each other and the land that nourishes us feels important.”

For more meditations on these elements, we’ll conclude with additional thoughts provided by the filmmakers and curators themselves:

Zehra Zehra

“It’s time to embrace the multiplicity of the American Gurl and share it with the world”

Kilo Kish

“With this project, I am interested in exploring how we can reimagine the American Dream to include women of color and our hopes and desires. These moving images represent the intersection of our past and present, exploring new ways of dreaming through their fusion.”

Solange Knowles

“Home transcends physical spaces, carried instead in objects, sounds, movement, and the solitude of personal devotion. Shakersss.mov is a poetic celebration of finding sanctuary and spirit within oneself, wherever the journey leads.”

Ella Ezeike 

“Words We Don’t Say was birthed from different places that shaped my identity. Being born in America to Nigerian parents and spending my young adult life in London – I was able to draw from these experiences and cultural nuances to make a film that was deeply personal but also rooted in my shared experiences with the women in my life.”

Alima Lee

“The effects of colonization have echoed through time in a way that we are hearing it and feeling it more loudly every day, with every injustice. With my film I have introduced a spiral of time, a reverberation letting us know many things have not changed and will continue to stay the same unless we resist. “

Shenny de Los Angeles & Amanda “iiritu” Morell

“It’s important to start this by giving gratitude to every single person who showed up to make this short film possible. To make a film about climate catastrophe and know that months later, Hurricane Milton and the wildfires in LA directly impacted some of our collaborators and their communities in Florida, is heartbreakingly violent to process. It’s unearthing to reflect the times through this work when you’re trying to survive it. But the beauty of this film is that it offers a moment of stillness. A moment to be with the land. To witness the sound of Mother Earth grieving. This is a film about preparing for a new world even after so much heartache.”

Melvonna Ballenger

“Your liberation is my liberation.”