Jéhan Òsanyìn

Residency period: October-December 2019
Website

October 2019

The piece she is working on is a tri-lingual still in-process work about personal history, intergenerational trauma, and memory.  In it she is investigating what memories are hers and what are the ones of the women before her. Memories that they couldn’t quite acknowledge and so she feels the need to do it.  

In this stage she is exploring how poetry, prose and ritual can be used to tell the story from my dreams.

November 2019

November’s Open Studio features several drafts of a memoir Jéhan has been writing. It’s about her life in the US as the child of immigrants from the West Indies (Jamaica and St. John). It details her being sent to Jamaica to live with her family when she was a small child so she could get some Jamaican culture because her father didn’t want to raise a “yankee pickney”, then goes on to describe his abandonment of her family and the resulting fallout.  It also explores what it means to be “white-people-black” in America and the dangers that accompany the ethnic erasure of Black people by the dominant, white, cisgendered wealthy power structures in the United States of America.

December 2019

In December Jéhan’s work focused on how Tina Landau’s, Anne Bogart’s, and Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints: Tempo, Duration, Kinesthetic Response, Repetition, Shape, Gesture, Architecture, Spatial Relationship, and Topography helped construct this nonlinear mostly improvised storytelling with the human body.  In the future the artist imagines that this work would be combined with the work from their October Open Studio showing to create a larger and longer durational performance.