In conversation with: CAROLINE JAPAL.
AKIN (2023)
Caroline Japal
H: 210mm x W: 160mm x D: 70mm
Dark blue hardcover book, with handmade paper, binded with yellow threads, and a spine decorated with wooden hair beads, amethyst & jade crystals, pearls, cowrie shells, and golden accessories.
CAROLINE’S MEMORIES
Born in Birmingham, Alabama (U.S.A.) in 1996, Caroline Japal is a visual artist, photographer, and creative director. With an intense interest of her own Black southern American roots, she creates work that explores the connections between identity and place by combining moving and still image, print, and object making. In her practice she uses archival research, first-hand accounts, and personal artifacts to create work that aims to explore the interconnectedness of Black artists today and the ties to their own personal histories.
Through confronting the realities of loss and grief, AKIN was created as a vessel to carry the history that had died with many ancestors before her. She describes this project as a “reconnection journey” that brings her back to her roots through learning and listening to the stories of those that come before her.
“As a Black American, our history was systematically erased. Our ancestors were ripped from our families and homes, our land, our culture, and languages. Since 1619, when the first ship carrying enslaved peoples of Africa landed on the shores of Virginia, and for the next 350 years my ancestors would be forced to find ways to pass down their own history, culture, and belief systems as best they could and be responsible for preserving what little they were able to hold onto about their homeland. AKIN is not just a journal documenting my personal journey of the discovery of who I am and where my people come from, but it is a love letter to the many Black people who came before me and fought like hell to persevere, so I can be here today to live my life as freely as the systems I’m subjected to live within will let me.”
(Desktop: Hover on images with transcriptions to listen / Mobile & Tablet: Click on images with transcriptions to listen)
Image courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“My name’s Caroline Japal, I’m an art director, a photographer, a visual artist, from Birmingham, Alabama in the US.Well, I’ve always been interested in art. The why for photography, it’s almost like I just felt into it, and really enjoyed it. And part of that was the hands on process of developing film, working in a dark room, making something with my hands. Because I’m a very tactile person, I get bored easily if I’m not actually making or doing something.
The why for art direction, it was fulfilling. I felt more enjoyment in creating an experience for other people, and getting to see them experience that, than I felt in just creating images. And just those images living on instagram, or on the web, or in print. It was more substantial to me, creating an entire experience for someone that they would see here, be involved in, and remember it after they left.”
Image courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“Recently, I think 3 words I would use to describe myself is…I want to say Southern. Because my identity and where I’m from, has become a huge part of my work recently. Also methodical, but I feel like methodical can sometimes come off in a bad way. But I think methodical in the sense of, I’m constantly thinking of connections between people, things, like my brain never stops. I’m constantly thinking…Oh that’s such a hard question [laughs]. Southern, methodical, I think also passionate. Like I’ve always been passionate about southern stories, and southern artists, and telling young people stories. So yeah, maybe that’s a little cliché for an artist, but I feel like that’s it.
And then to describe my work. I don’t think this is a descriptor, but anthology. Minimal in a sense… [about her anthological work]…Like I collect things, and I tend to compile a bunch of stuff into one space. So when I had my magazine, it was an anthology of stories of different artists. Same with the project I’m working on now, it’s an anthology of stories of different artists. So it’s all under one umbrella, but each thing can live on its own. Then also what I’m doing with my family project, my genealogy, it’s an anthology of the Japal-Jackson family. And it’s all these individual stories of these people that are coming together. Maybe storytelling? I never thought that I was really a huge storyteller. But recently when I was back home, I went back to my undergrad, and saw one of my professor, and sat in one of her classes. I talked to them, and she was saying, in all of my work, even, if it was indirect I was always telling the story of the South. And what it’s like to be an artist in the South. So yeah those three.”
Image courtesy of Caroline Japal. AKIN blue mosaic cover.
“So AKIN started with me just simply researching my family’s genealogy. All of my grandparents expect one have passed, and it happened in a very short amount of time, like over 6 years. And after that I kind of felt an emptiness almost, because I was like I wasted all this time that I had with them, and didn’t learn about the different aspects of our family, but also our cultures. And that emptiness made me want to learn all those things, but I’m almost learning it from an outsider perspective. Where I’m having to research myself. And it’s weird because some of these things are super familiar. Like the things with my mom’s side of the family, because I was around them, or like my immediate side of the family on my dad’s side I grew up with them. But then if I go further back to my grandparents, and great-grandparents, I didn’t grow up around them, sometimes my parents didn’t grow up around them, it’s like I’m almost reading someone else’s story.
So it started there with researching the genealogy, and then I was like well, that’s not enough for me to just know that. I want to put together something that is permanent, and sticks with our family for a long time. Similar to a family Bible. That’s the most correct reference that I can bring up to people, when I speak about the project. But instead of a family Bible being so focused on a family’s religion, and relating to God; it’s more about me documenting our family, and where we’ve been, who we are, the history of those people, even though I’ve never met them. And keeping all those personal stories in a place where it can be pass down to the people after me, and be like this is who we are. This is what we’ve been through, here is a physical representation of us. I don’t want any of that stuff to get lost. It already essentially was lost, and I’m having to re-dig it up.”
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“Not until we’re older, do we start to think about…our parents were once our age, and our grandparents were once our age, and what was life like for them. You don’t think about that stuff until you’re older, because you’re so consumed with life, and being a teenager, being a child. I feel like it doesn’t happen until later in life, when you really start to think about, oh shoot, I only have so much time left with this person. What do I want to know from them? Especially in black families, because you can’t easily find that knowledge. It’s passed down orally, or written somewhere, or it’s passed down through artefacts in your family. Like for us it’s family Bibles, church programmes, different things like that where we were able to document stuff. But who has all that stuff, who has the family photos, who has the albums, who has the letters, who has the immigration papers? All of those things, you kind of have to find for yourself, if you’re not able to ask the person whose it is.”
Image courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“So when I decided to actually make the book, which is, to me going to be a mini, mini year long work in progress, as I find more materials and information. But the foundation of it, I want it to pull in elements that resonate with me. So like the colours, the textures, the ornaments on it, I want it to all be something that when I look at this, I'm like, yes, this feels like a piece of me essentially. So I incorporated things like the thread colour, is like the colour of the lushness of Alabama, like the greens and the yellows that you see even when like the grass dies, it's still yellow, and it's still sort of vibrant yellow, the blue with like, how I grew up fishing with my dad, and with my family, that's something we always did, we always went to the beach, we always went fishing.
Also just, there's a lot of visuals of nature that are involved in it. Because growing up in the South, you're completely surrounded by nature all the time. I mean you can go into the city and stuff, even our city is not like a New York City where it's just a complete concrete jungle. It's still very much lush, and the air is humid, the everything's very tactile, and you almost feel sensitive being there, because you can feel the environment around you. So I wanted to put that in the book. And so I had that in mind when I thought about what materials, and what textures to use. And then with the handmade paper. And the construction of each chapter of the book being about a different group of people within my family. I don't know, it just something some decisions just felt right. And that's just what it was.”
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“And it felt very me, and then also adding in the hair beads on the back on the spine. It's just something that made it even more personal. It also made the book delicate. So it is like in a sense, fragile. it's not just something you set up on your shelf, or you just carry around all the time. It's something that's made to live in a place and be treated as such. Yeah, so everything, every single material resonated with me personally. And yeah, even down to me putting reproductions of my family photos in the book. Family photos are something that are very personal, that you don't just share with everyone. And so being able to get those from my family members, and make copies of those and put them in there. And then handwriting the stories that they've told me, when I talked to them with those photos. It was almost like a cathartic process too, but yeah, it was just very personal. And it always wanted to feel like it resonated with me. That's why I didn't rush the process of making it either. I knew that it would be something that grows over time. And I've just wanted to create like a foundation to start doing that.”
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“I mean, just like when I was talking about my grandparents, and not having access to those stories. The book is creating that access for my family personally. It's healing in a way, because there's family members we don't know very much about or like only a few family members know very much about. But then also, this is something else that I didn't think about until recently because I was back home and I was doing this, but just going to the places, and talking to my family members. I went and saw my great aunt, when I was in Brewton, and she is one of the few of my grandpa’s siblings that are still alive. And I just sat down with her and I said, just tell me about your life. Like, where you grew up and just anything that you think of, and it was beautiful. I mean, we were at her house for like five or six hours and she was just talking, we were looking through family photos. She was telling me who these people were. I don't know, the whole process is just so cathartic, but not just for me either, for my mom, for my dad.”
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“I got to while I was home, go to all of my grandparents graves, and my great grandparents on my mom's side. And my dad hadn't been to his parents grave since the funeral. And his brother is also out there, and we got to see the space. We left flowers. We cleaned it, we cleaned my mom's parents graves, and her great grandparents graves. And it's just like something about honouring your ancestors, and taking care of them. And making sure that they're still respected even when they're no longer here, is...I don't know if I can describe that feeling. But it's very...I think cathartic is the best word. I can feel it's healing something in me, even though I'm doing that not necessarily for me. Like I may be doing it for my mom, or doing it for my dad. But just like it's healing me, it's also healing them in a way. And I don't know if I'll ever have that conversation with them and know exactly like how they feel fully about it. But we talk about like certain stuff. And I know that it also is something that they're enjoying.”
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal.
(On whether its healing for her parents as well) “I don't know if it's completely is [healing] because, like, for instance, my mom's mom died when my mom was in high school. And just until recently, did I start asking her, what was her mom like? What memories does she have with her? Because sometimes those things are sensitive. But there's some things that I just...because I know how I deal with grief. And I don't want to stir up unwanted feelings in someone ever, even though they're my parents. So I still try to be mindful of that. But I do think in a way of me doing it, and them not having to do it themselves. It's healing.”
(On her parents discovering other stories through her work) “Definitely. Even them recalling stuff that may not be on the forefront of their memory. But as I'm like...when I was talking to my aunt, my great aunt, my mom was down there too. And so she was hearing stories, and she was like, well, that makes so much sense! Because I never knew this about that one person before. But now like I'm connecting dots and stuff. Same with my dad, I talked to his brother and his sister, and asked them questions about stuff that they remember from growing up. And my dad's one of the younger siblings. So there's a lot of stuff that he doesn't remember either about the family in Grenada because he had never been. But my oldest uncle had been there and knows a lot of those aunts and uncles of his, so my greater aunts and uncles. So I feel like everyone's kind of refining things out with each other.”
Image credit from Caroline Japal
(On how the reaffirmation of Black Caribbean modern identities can nurture love & self-acceptance? ) “I think what's been huge for me, is learning how multicultural my blackness is. Specifically me growing up in the United States. Well, I think most black people, or just people of colour in general; you grow up in a world that centres whiteness so much, that sometimes you internalise that, and tend to other yourself even in situations that you're completely acceptable in. And I've been on a process of unlearning some of those tendencies I have, but when researching my family, and looking at the things that my grandparents went through, just to get into the country, the way the community helped them become stable, so that I can be where I'm at now. Getting to just go to school somewhere else, and like explore places, and not have to think about those specific hardships. All of that goes into me almost feeling like a more whole person.
And knowing like, I feel more grounded in my identity because of the people that came before me. And so I think all of those things come together to teach you to love yourself more, because you're constantly reaffirming you, your identity, yourself, your people, your culture, all of that is becoming just this process over and over and over again, of constant love reaffirmation. It's just, yeah. I think the process has done that for me.”
Tiktok edits, from The.Bleu.print.
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“But when I was little, I had no concept of who I was or what was happening. Until I got older. And I started to really think about like...okay, where are these people from? Like, why do we do these certain things? Why do we have these traditions? Yeah, I think it changes all the time. Now, it's more concrete than ever. Because of all the work that I'm doing to try to understand and learn. Because for me, I'm more American, before I'm anything else. Obviously, I'm black before I'm anything else, but then I'm more American before I'm Caribbean, because I didn't grow up there. I didn't experience that culture. But there are things that I do have from that culture that I got from my granddad, which I didn't know any different.
I was half raised by my grandparents, half raised by my parents. So that was just normal to me, it was just like how we did life, the way we ate, the way he pronounced certain things, the way we kept the house, like I didn't know any differently. So maybe it was me taking it for granted a younger age, because I was just unaware. And now because I'm aware, I don't take those things for granted, and they are very important to me. And I want to learn more and more as I can, which is why I'm like talking to these family members and trying to make those connections from experiences to actual knowledge of those things.”
Image courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“And then I think the biggest time was when my granddad passed. And I thought, oh, shoot, I know nothing about this whole side of me, and neither does my dad, like he didn't either. So realising I'm missing something, and having this gap...It made me feel I needed to deep dive into this and learn so much about it. And I get so preoccupied with that. And trying to discover this one part of me, that almost felt neglected, like the black part of me. Learning about that history, and that culture. So I don't know. I think at one point in time, especially right after his death, I was very much in, the mindset of having to learn anything and everything I can. Whereas now I'm more at the place of, I just need to discover things as they are within my family, and learn about us. I don't need to know everything about the culture. But I want to definitely know, I want to have an understanding of what my grandpa's journey was from being born and growing up in Grenada, to coming to the United States. What that pathway was like for him, and then being an immigrant in the South back in during the Civil Rights era.
And then also on my mom's side, learning about my grandpa who grew up in really rural southern Alabama, joined the military, travelled all over the world, and ended up coming back to that same place. And that's where he's resting now. So I think learning about those journeys and migration around the world, and seeing how it made them who they are, is also influencing me on how I think about myself and our family today. And where we're at, and how we got to the place we are.”
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal.
(On things that symbolise home for her) “Is it bad that for me that's food? I think it's multiple things. One is definitely food. Because I think that's what I got most from my granddad, and him coming from Grenada. We had rice for breakfast. We always had goat and curry chicken. Just certain things that I know my mom wasn't making at home. But then also on the other side, the food that my grandma was making was like, cornbread and cabbage, and smothered pork chops, and fried chicken and biscuits. So that was our southern side, but then also other things. To me, it's things like cultural ephemera. So the family Bibles, the church fans. Certain things in nature like, magnolia trees. Because in south we have a lot of magnolias and pine trees. If I sit on our back porch for two hours, pine straws will just fall onto our porch or pine cones.
Definitely family albums. I got a chance to look through my grandpa's family album when I was back home, and it's literally just black construction paper, with photos stuck to it and then like a cover on there. Quilts, my grandma’s quilts and sews, and makes outfits. My mom has a bucket of baby clothes she made for us when we were little. All those things that the people my family have touched personally.”
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal.
(On a memory she cherish that connects her to her culture) “Okay. So many things surround food in the south, like Southern people that's where it's at. When I was little, my grandma and grandpa, they had a pecan tree about their house. But we as kids, would run around outside, my grandpa would give us buckets and we would run around, grab all the pecans that were on the ground, and then go inside and help him shell them. It’s an oblong shell, and it cracks in half like this, and one side of the pecan is on that side, one side on the side. We would take out one side and eat it, and he'd take out the other side out in a bucket for my grandma and him to eat. And so even though we picked up all these pecans, we only got like a small amount.
But it's almost the same thing with my other grandparents in Brewton. We spent a lot of time outside, my granddad had a pear tree. I remember when we’d go down there during the spring and summer, he'd go out to the pear tree, and this giant stick, almost like a hoe, it had little prongs on it. It was a 10 foot long stick, and you put it up in the tree, and shake the tree. And then we'd go and collect all the pears, and put them in a bucket. Then we come inside and my grandma would make like pear cobbler, pear pie, pear jam, whatever we could have out the pears. Yeah, so those are two distinct memories that I have of doing something with my grandparents, and also at a young age. Those were things that I feel, were defining moments of spending time with them.”
Image courtesy of Caroline Japal
(Left) bell hooks, Belonging, A Culture Of Place, 1990. (Right) Image courtesy of Caroline Japal.
“So right now I'm reading Belonging, A Culture Of Place from bell hooks, I think it's a collection of essays. And every essay is about a different topic or thing, but they're all relating to her talking about what place means to us, and how that changes depending on where we're at. And I feel like that book is written about me. Because she talks about her leaving rural Kentucky, and going to California, to a predominantly white institution. And being in this academic, very structured, institutionalised experience, versus when she goes home, she can just walk around barefoot outside, there's nature everywhere. Everyone's poor, everyone's just living their lives. Like it's a very slow lifestyle.
And that's kind of how I feel about home, I mean, we're not walking around barefoot. But we're very much...the pace of life is so much slower. It's been taking me a long time to read it too, because I'm not reader in general. But if there's something that really resonates with me, I need time to process it. So as I've been reading it, I'll read a chapter and then, reflect about, all the ways I related to it, and how I see myself in the experiences she's talking about. And it's just, I don't know, I think this the first time I've read something I resonated so deeply with.
And I'm gonna read Stories Of A Native Son, by James Baldwin, I can't remember the exact name of it, but I'm gonna read that next. And this is another book of essays of him talking about, the black experience in non black spaces.
Images courtesy of Caroline Japal
(Left) Yussef Dayes, Black Classical Music (album cover), 2023. (Right) Lovie, Black Ambient (playlist).
(On a song that represents self-love for her) “Oh, gosh, hold on. Let me look at my phone because I'm so bad with names of things. That is a really good question...Oh, you know what, I don't even have to look! Youssef Dayes' new album, Black Classical Music.
So I got the record, and I listened to it for the first time with my boyfriend. And literally I started crying. First of all, it's just beautiful. Like his musics just beautiful. But I heard sounds in it that, I recognised. I could hear where he was referencing. Music from like, the 60s, 70s, 80s...I can hear reggae in it, I can hear jazz music in it, I can hear blues, I hear all that in it. And maybe it's because of what I'm working on right now, I'm more acutely aware of it. But that was so beautiful to me, and I read the inside cover of the LP and everything. This is just same with the bell hooks book, it just deeply resonates with me right now, in this time and place that I'm in my life.
And I think right now that's it. Other than that, I've been listening to a playlist called Black Ambient. And it's just a lot of ambient music by black artists. That also resonates with me, I'm into music with no words at the moment. And just kind of feeling what I hear.”