Curated by Chantel Akworkor Thompson, What the Ancestors Whispered is a quiet yet expansive offering rooted in reverence for ancestral knowledge and the ways it moves through matter, memory, and our relationship with land, sea, and sky. This presentation honours that living legacy through three resonant practices that each channel ancestral presence as a guide toward healing, remembrance, and renewal.

Asia Clarke’s sculptural installation, FREE WILL: Manifestors of Realities, consists of five hand-carved wooden masks adorned with Afrocentric hair aesthetics designed by Clarke. Each mask pays homage to a seminal figure of Afro-Caribbean resistance and liberation: Maurice Bishop (Grenada), Queen Nanny (Jamaica), Cécile Fatiman (Haiti), Carlota Lucumí (Cuba), and Frantz Fanon (Martinique). These leaders are remembered not only for their courage but for their enduring legacies of collective struggle, freedom, and radical imagination.

By integrating craft traditions, hair artistry, and sculptural form, Clarke bridges ancestral narratives with contemporary diasporic futures. The masks become both vessels of remembrance and speculative portals, embodying the wisdom of the past while inviting audiences to imagine new possibilities of liberation and unity.

This year’s FUZE theme, “All a We”, speaks to Caribbean kinship, unity, and shared heritage across geography and generation. Clarke’s masks embody this spirit by drawing together freedom fighters from across the region, showing how individual acts of courage are bound to a collective story of resilience.

Bryony Ella will present new works that expand her exploration of “embodied ecology” — a practice that unravels colonial separations between nature and spirit, as well as debuting her fi lm Stand of The Sun. Her intuitive ink-based works on recycled acrylic and large canvases from her Shadow Dance series trace the pulse of interconnection between human, ancestral, and elemental realms. The Inklings series maps interspecies entanglement, showing how ancestral memory lives within soil, ocean, and body, while Shadow Dance, created in Ithaca, Greece blends Western mythology and Caribbean spirituality to reflect on mourning, metamorphosis, and belonging.

Practicing between Trinidad and the UK, Ella reimagines ecology as a spiritual language of reciprocity — one that celebrates the human body as porous, organic, and deeply entwined with all living systems.

Emily Alice Mitchell presents three new prints that work with archival photography and personal memory. Manipulating ephemera and photos belonging to her family in Trinidad, Mitchell transforms these fragments into visual poems, piecing together a narrative of their lives from what remains.

Through these layered compositions, Mitchell engages oral histories as a means of preserving transgenerational connections to rhythm and water — recurring metaphors for memory, migration, and return. By merging the personal archive with collective histories, her work becomes both an act of mourning and an offering of reconnection.

Together, these artists create a space of intimacy and stillness — a sacred interior where ancestral presences may be felt rather than seen. The booth invites audiences to pause, listen, and receive: to remember that what we inherit is not only genetic or historical, but cosmological.

Aligning with FUZE 2025’s theme, “All a We,” the presentation embodies togetherness as both spiritual and material inheritance — affirming ancestry not as rupture, but as continuum.

This marks the first time that all three artists will exhibit in the Caribbean. For DēpART, the presentation signals a continued commitment to bridging African and diasporic perspectives through exhibitions, residencies, and cultural collaborations that honour storytelling as a tool for connection, legacy, and transformation.

In-line images: Asia Clarke, Maurice Bishop, 2025, and Bryony Ella, Stand of The Sun, Film Still, 2025

Lead image: Emily Alice Mitchell, Zora, 2025