Camille Turner, Jérôme Havre, & Cauleen Smith
Triangle Trade is a collaboration between the artists Cauleen Smith, Jérôme Havre, and Camille Turner. The film explores Black identity, diaspora, colonialism, and relationships to homeland. Together, the artists create multiple imagined worlds by combining their respective practices: Havre his puppetry, Smith their film, and Turner her performance. Puppet avatars of the artists travel across three distinct landscapes created to represent themselves—a desert island, a volcano, and an icy planet. Animated by the artists and the film crew, the puppets navigate landscapes that at once isolate them and offer the possibility of transformative connection. As they interact with their constructed worlds, they reflect on blackness as a state of becoming, a mode of experience that reaches simultaneously into multiple futures and histories.
Born in Jamaica and France respectively, both Turner and Havre are immigrants to Canada. Smith was born in the US. Each artist reflects on how their identities and relationships to place have been shaped by displacement and violence but also by love and resistance. Turner describes her experience of land as “tempered by a feeling of loss.” She says: “I am a displaced person. When I journey to the Motherland, it is with the understanding that I am a displaced person there as well. My relationship is tenuous even though this land gave birth to my ancestors. I imagine all land as not my land. However, I had an experience when I went to Jamaica, the land where my mother was born and her mother before her. It was the only place where I felt a sense of belonging, and yet, it rightly belongs to someone else that I do not know, someone whose family line has been severed due to colonization. This deep questioning of land and belonging leads back to the central question of what and where is home.”