“HERE BY DRAGONS” was
a term used by European cartographers to fill in the voids of unexplored
territories with illustrations of dragons and other mythological creatures. Wherever
there was the unknown, myths emerged to explain it. When the ‘void’
became what is now known as Africa, the geographical information was considered
both unknown and evolving. And, prior to the 17th century, this unknown was
populated by myths, in the forms of imaginative illustrations of animals (Dürer's
Rhinoceros), tales to deny authorship of bronze craftsmanship, or to define a
culture as ‘barbaric’. Myths have a power to fill a void, and to fill it with a
alternative narrative. Not until the
17th century were European maps of Africa stripped of centuries of accumulated
myth, misconception, and unsustainable guesswork, taking the mapping of Africa
back to its ‘bare bones’ of substantiated fact, leaving the interior as a blank canvas, entitled the ‘Dark Continent’, a challenge to a new
generation of explorers[1]. [read: colonisers]
Yet, this blank canvas became the basis for a divisive mythology - terra
nullius, the land belongs to no one – and myths evolved from its lands to
its identities.
Today, these geographic voids no longer exist, but the notion of dragons
persists as a metaphor for the mythologies that are used to fill in the voids
of identities. In the January 1985 issue of Playboy, an essay originally titled
“Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” by James Baldwin shifted the meaning from where the dragons are to whom
they represent. This exhibition isn't about mythical creatures, but about us as dragons
— embodiments of mythologies, born from both violence and dreams, lies and
truths, dilemmas and realities. For the ‘Black’ diaspora, the dragons dwell at
the meeting point of two seas—between the coastlines of Britain and Africa.
Here, a mythology shapes diasporic identities, navigating an idea of ‘home’
between paternal migrant narratives of a ‘homeland’ and stories of the lands we
inhabit that feel as foreign. We are the dragons—part myth, part reality—existing
before us and created by a* humanity itself. We shouldn't shy away from this
void; it's where we breathe fire, transcend borders and ideals, and discover a
language that can be transformative.’.
[1] Aaron Arrowsmith
(1750 - 1823) a English cartographer. Created the ‘Africa To The Committee and
Members of the British Association, 1802 republished in 1811 prior to the era
of ‘New Imperialism’
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