S5E7: Visual Memory, Artistic Practice & Haunted Spaces

Image credits: Dylan Valley by Jurgen Meekel and Bayeté Ross Smith by Aleph Media

Dylan Valley interviews Kitso Lynn Lelliott and Bayeté Ross Smith about their artistic practice and projects. 

Kitso reflects on her PhD, “South Atlantic Hauntings: Geographies of Memory, Ancestralities and Re-Memberings”, and Bayeté discusses “Red Summers VR”, his 360 immersive media project about racially motivated domestic terrorism in the U.S. from 1917 to 1921.  

It’s an expansive conversation that engages with unresolved histories, racial and epistemological violence, the Atlantic Ocean, identities, the afterlives of colonialism, photography, how bodies relate to the world and claiming space. 

Dylan Valley is a documentary filmmaker and a lecturer at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town. Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s practice moves between video installation, film and writing. She is currently a senior lecturer in History of Arts with the Wits school of Arts. Bayeté Ross Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, filmmaker, and educator. He is a faculty member at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia Law School’s inaugural artist-in-residence.

In this episode we stand in solidarity with writer and legal scholar Xu Zhiyong, imprisoned in China. You can read more about his case here.

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