Farewell to you dear Eden — Isaac Harris Sharing Event Feb 2025

Join us at Market Gallery on February 15th 5-7pm for the sharing event of Farewell to you dear Eden, an ongoing project by Isaac Harris. This event showcases work developed during the Market Studio residency, featuring both physical installation and an audio accompaniment of written work.

This sharing will include a listening session for the audio work at 5.30-6pm. We will also be open on Sunday 16th on a drop in basis 11am-4pm, with audio content looping.

The event will take place in our space at 13 Ross Street, which is wheelchair accessible and has an accessible gender-neutral toilet. We have travel and childcare bursaries available, please get in touch on market@marketgallery.org to request them.

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Extract:

Away from Paradise evermore

To be stuck, in this abyss of the internal soul, wiped of filiation, of any affiliation to the past, novel, delicate, mutilated, to not even know what liberation is, to exist as a husk in totality, as a mode of labor, as a vehicle for the great rots of the world. There are no longer any deviations, the totalising force has come, and without it what are we? 

Struck by apathy, beautiful, languorous waves wash over. These visions that haunt. Trapped. I seek only true beauty, will I find it here. My heart. My turgid heart.

Farewell to you dear eden. Farewell.

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Farewell to you dear Eden is an ongoing project exploring two separate but related psychological crises that shackle the black consciousness to reactionary ideals and political stagnation, sacrificing true liberation. Refering both to the paradise lost (whether real or imagined), through the brutality of the Maafa (Trans-atlantic Slave Trade), and to saying goodbye to the myth of an edenic past – an unattainable Arcadia that shackles us with nostalgia, complacency and rage. Influenced both by Fanon and his critiques of Negritude and Glissant’s embrace of opacity.

To say goodbye to eden is to embody a double pain – to reject an ideal that paralyses us now in the present. An embrace of the opaque. The constantly changing nature of our circumstance, as we acknowledge the ever present state of our being. To acknowledge that we have and may never leave the ship-the womb-the abyss. 

To reckon with history, the suffering of the body, the collective howl of a people in perpetual crisis. 

Irreducible the past, there exists no neat resolution or a linear narrative of human progress. A rejection that entails the embrace of that which is most uncomfortable. The abyss as a site of possibility —- see the blue light on the horizon – faint, undeniable – what does it hail?

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Isaac Harris is a writer and multimedia artist from Virginia whose practice interrogates cultural and historical narratives through fiction. Their work explores themes of memory, the absurdity of Black identity, and the fluidity of power, focusing on narratives set around the greater Black diaspora in the Atlantic world.