Chantal Gibson’s Souvenir

Souvenir is a multimedia installation that challenges the persistent positioning of people of African descent as “displayed”, “displaced”, and “disappeared” within Canadian literary, historical, and institutional narratives. The process of defacing the individuality of the spoons is amplified by the ghostly traces of memory contained in the book. The piece poetically reenacts a history of violence and erasure of individual personal histories and narratives. It conjures the attempted forced reduction of these into a pattern of sameness, while evoking a collective historical experience of Blackness.