Looking Back (Being and Memory): A river holds a perfect memory and I’ll Be Back!

by Hope Pearl Strickland

A river holds a perfect memory

A river holds a perfect memory (2024) meanders gently across waterways in Jamaica, through leisure activities such as rafting on the Martha Brae River and a night-time boat trip in Falmouth’s bioluminescent Lagoon. In the UK, archival footage tracks industrial impact upon the landscape in Northern England – as water becomes a resource and a reservoir is constructed in Rochdale. The film considers the interrelation of water, memory and labour and plays with techniques of refusal, errantry and repetition. Through the divergent and overlapping temporalities of working across archival footage, newly shot 16mm and LIDAR scans, the film uses water to track the impact of the industrial revolution and labour migration upon supposedly disparate communities.

The original premise of ‘a river holds a perfect memory’ was based on a series of labour protests in January 2016, St Elizabeth, Jamaica that highlighted the complex, racio-colonial capitalist logics that continue to shape the use of Black River. Rivers fascinate me for a myriad of reasons: they hold within them the poetics of collapsed time and diasporic memory; alongside complex flows of resource and labour extraction. Spending time researching reservoirs and industry in the North of England and rivers with my extended family in Jamaica, the more these worlds seemed to swirl and eddy together.

(2024) 17 minutes. Digital, 16mm, archival.

Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Touchstones, Rochdale with support from HOME, Manchester supported using public funding from Arts Council England.

I’ll Be Back!

I’ll Be Back! begins and ends with the story of the rebel maroon Francois Mackandal. In 1758, Mackandal was condemned to be burned at the stake, not only for his crimes but for his radical powers of metamorphosis.

Filmed in archives and museums across the UK, I’ll Be Back! explores a series of collections holding objects of colonial violence. Amongst these is a book containing a diagram of a slave ship, a key document in the abolitionist movement widely published for its shocking nature, and a collection of insects gathered in Sierra Leone by a colonial topographer mapping borders and defining British and French territory in West Africa. Shifting across digital, 16mm and archival formats, the film interrogates institutional collecting practices and reconsiders the distances between myth, history and machinations of power.

(2022) 10 minutes 54 seconds. Digital, 16mm, archival.

Commissioned by FACT Liverpool with public funding from Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council. Presented in collaboration with Hervisions, supported by The Granada Foundation.

Artist Bio

Hope Pearl Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and researcher from Manchester, UK with British-Jamaican heritage. Her work sits at the intersection of experimental film and documentary practices, moving across archival, analogue and digital formats in order to quietly sit across from and outside of time. Her practice wrestles with violence, disparate colonial landscapes and attempts to ask how we might live in a world and relate to one another with care whilst amongst and against systems of power and control. Hope’s work has screened internationally at film festivals including the 59th New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Scotland and Exis Experimental Film Festival, Seoul. She was awarded the 2023 Aesthetica Emerging Art Prize.

This film presentation is part of the series Looking Back (Being and Memory), in response to Barbara Walker: Being Here, the major exhibition at Arnolfini for spring 2025.

Banner image: Hope Strickland, a river holds a perfect memory (2025). Film still. Courtesy of the artist.