This project takes its name from a speech by director and cinematographer Arthur Jafa, in which Jafa quotes Nam June Paik as saying, “The culture that’s going to survive in the future is the culture that you can carry around in your head.” These things we carry around with us manifest themselves as memory and ways of being in our bodies. When we enter a new cultural context, we use what we already know—drawing on memories that are heavily informed by the present contexts in which they are (re)called into being—as a personal repertoire to make sense of the world around us. Therefore, what we know of the present is put in constant dialogue with our personal pasts, pasts that have established certain habits (or habitus) within our bodies.

My investigation of the relationship between the body, memory, and ways of knowing takes on physical form in the work presented here. The hats are made out of maps drawn by Senegalese expatriates living in the U.S. and by Americans who have lived in Senegal. These maps were drawn as part of an interview process in which interviewees talked about where they lived in Senegal, and the connection between bodily actions (gestures, postures, ways of moving) and a sense of Senegalese-ness.

This process of informal map making draws on the maker’s ability to remember. In the creation of this spatial archive, misrepresentations of scale, detail, and other points of accuracy, while upsetting the maps’ ability to function as faithful representations of place, connect the maps evermore resolutely to the makers themselves. These maps also become sites of a residue of exchange in which the makers were communicating something to someone else. Whether one is familiar with these places or not, these maps-as-hats encourage connection between the wearer and the makers.

More images on their way...