‘I told you once before, America. We family. You and I. We are family.’ – Bernie Mac, 2002

When the US comedian, actor and producer Bernie Mac sat down in front of tens of millions of Americans and addressed them as kin, it wasn’t some uncontrollable outburst of love – it was a confession. Despite his best attempts to protect his household from an unknown enemy in a post-9/11 world, Bernie explained to his viewers that he failed. He had failed because in the US there is no enemy to be found: there is only an ‘us’ – a people, united in all their fear and all their vanity, tuning in every week to see their ordinary lives acted out by someone just like them.

In almost every part of the world you will find people performing American life. This stronghold on popular imagination goes far beyond the country’s ability to entertain. The stories we hear about life in the ‘US of A’ – from founding fathers and cowboys to self-made wealth – are central to the foundation of US identity. This is a nation that feeds off its own lore. A nation that continually allows its history to be written by the loudest, prettiest or richest people it has to offer, turning even mundanity into something of a spectacle. Ultimately, this makes the role of telling the unfiltered truth seem, at best, a thankless task and, at worst, just a little too goddamn boring.

But in Garrett Bradley’s America, 2019, history isn’t fixed to a single source of truth. She finds the past stretched across the borders of violence, tradition and ‘internet content’. It is slippery, ungovernable. We find it impossible to say where exactly one memory ends and another begins, where self-expression becomes intellectual property or where black speech dissolves into internet slang.

While some might balk at the idea of a mutable past, for Bradley this flexibility is a blank canvas upon which she imprints her own interpretation of years gone by. America combines archival footage of black American history from the early 1900s to newly shot performances, a history that Bradley believes to be inseparable from ‘America’ as a whole. But, in this age, you can’t make a film that defines the US as a single entity; the power of the US empire lies in its virality. You can open a web browser and find traces of America – its cars, its bombs, its music – right in the palm of your hand.

Recognising the ubiquity of this influence around the world, Bradley’s America looks to redefine our collective understanding of the country she calls home. What results is a chronology of moments that are engraved into the American psyche: the Boy Scouts, the family radio, actors in blackface, the white cloth of the Klan. Bradley posits these vignettes alongside clips of numerous unreleased films, such as Lime Kiln Club Field Day, 1913, which comprises an all-black cast performing just 15 years after the US declared racial segregation to be an acceptable stratification of society.

Rather than present her cinematic timeline on the traditional silver screen, Bradley went a step further and exhibited America as a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation on the first floor of New York’s MoMA. The film was projected onto four chiffon screens, suspended in air to form a floating cross. Inside the space, one might find themselves caught beneath the gaze of Bradley’s backlit subjects, their line of sight drawn to each silhouetted figure in the frame. By not being able to make out their faces, we are pulled closer to these actors, we relate to them with intrigue, rather than scrutiny, for example, we see a man being baptised in the reflection of a mirror, slicing through the frame at a 45-degree angle. Even when the actors’ faces are in focus, the camera’s positioning underlines a certain familiarity that Bradley shares with her subjects.

This is not a documentary meant to ‘reveal’ some sensational, never-before-seen account of US history. In the aftermath of Saidiya Hartman’s method of ‘critical fabulation’, artists including Bradley have taken it upon themselves to dissect the existence of archival material and reflect on what might be missing from historical accounts compiled in the name of empire. For example, Onyeka Igwe’s Specialised Technique, 2018, incorporates early 20th-century footage of half-naked women dancers that was shot by Britain’s Colonial Film Unit in Nigeria. Igwe takes stills from these archival films and addresses her subjects directly, inscribing her reflections upon the film through subtitles: ‘Did you want your whole body in the shot? I don’t know if I am being a prude by asking that.’ The artist’s rhetorical dialogue with these women is a clear shift from the traditional pretence of objectivity. In fact, archival collections are rife with gaps and silences that overlook subjugated perspectives, replacing them instead with historical accounts, which, to quote Dorothy Berry, ‘erase’ or ‘avoid’ the mention of inequity. For Igwe, Hartman and Bradley, we have no choice but to review our own positionality in relation to the archive, because it too was shaped by the realities of hegemony.

What good then can a flexible telling of history bring? Why re-enact a narrative at all, if you are not revealing any new information to us about the subject matter? For Bradley, the perception of history is as powerful, if not more powerful than its totality. She understands that the qualities of space (physicality, light, distance, proportion) can be manipulated to shape memory. Bradley’s America is a physical manifestation of the messy interrelations that comprise American history. Her layered projections pull disparate historical moments into one another, mimicking the recursive presence of black performance in America from 1913 through to the present day. Viewers are made to understand that the racist conditions that necessitated an all-black cast in 1913 have not been ‘lost to history’ – they have a continued effect on the perception and performance of blackness today. Recognising this, Bradley looks beyond the screen, transforming the socio-political continuum of racial difference into a spatial one.

Bradley’s MoMA installation stretches the gap between popular re-enactments of American life and the lived experience of blackness in America. In this installation, blackness in the US does not exist in a private enclosure, it exists just as it does in the world, woven into the fabric of US history. With this understanding, Bradley illuminates the room, baptising viewers in this retelling of 20th-century life in the US. She abandons the hegemony of sight in favour of an embodied knowledge, allowing us to directly engage with the intersections of race and memory. At a time where immersive storytelling often lacks any context or criticality, Bradley’s America offers us a welcome reorientation of the senses.

Bami Oke is the winner of the Film and Video Umbrella and Art Monthly Michael O’Pray Prize 2024.

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The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative in partnership with Art Monthly, supported by University of East London and Arts Council England.

Image: Garrett Bradley, America, 2019