Lament (in Blue)

Lament (in Blue) is a ten-minute movement-based performance by Jasmine Violet in response to works by Anawana Haloba and Sawangwongse Yawnghwe presented in Artes Mundi 11 at Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

The performance unfolds through a physical negotiation of space, where the body becomes both witness and residue. Moving through the gallery, Jasmine activates the floor and surrounding architecture using a mixture of sugar and glow powder. The material is at once consumable, extractive, and luminous, functioning as both a trace and a lure, holding within it the afterlives of global "trades": sugar, tea, coffee, opium, tobacco, oil, diamonds, chocolate, and people. These are not neutral exchanges, but systems shaped through violence, coercion, and colonial expansion.

Sound operates as a central structural force within the work. Drawing on Haloba’s immersive sonic strategies, the performance is accompanied by a soundtrack composed of vocals and rhythm. The lyrics and beat seek to carry the audience through a fluctuating emotional register of highs and lows, mirroring cycles of desire, dependence, and depletion. The voice becomes both guide and interruption, at times seductive and at times dissonant, echoing the instability between consumption and consequence.

In parallel, Yawnghwe’s painting series Still Life with Foreign Mud meditates on cultivation, narcotics, and the entanglement of survival and exploitation. The poppy emerges not only as a symbol but as a living index of imperial economies and their ongoing conditions, reflecting the unstable boundary between need and addiction. Substances and systems that sustain life can become those that produce dependency and control. The body moves through cycles of intensity and collapse, invoking both the highs of consumption and its aftermath.

Lament (in Blue) gestures toward the enduring impact of these histories within diasporic and local communities. The glowing blue residue marks a presence that is both spectral and persistent, a visual echo of what remains, circulates, and resists erasure.

Videographer: Dekzography
Music: Rhys Bell

Artists