Concept

Recharting.Inspiration.Navigated.Re-Distanced Socially

*Update Covid-19 3/20*
Pirate Jenny nods to the current social paralysis and the exhausted sentiments from the unknown while lifting up those on the frontlines of health and remembering those who we continue to lose to this virus. Social distancing is a new territory and frontier and PJ as time traveler is also preparing to navigate radio waves beyond constraints of social distance - reporting future territories where global illness is not a social threat. #lovePJ

Pirate Jenny, or PJ as she is nicknamed is my persona/alter ego. PJ represents nomadism, mobility and the strength of the human spirit over trauma and displacement. She physically embodies the pirates and slaves, past and present that collude and survive as outcasts. Over the course of her travels, the instruments she makes to navigate space become a part of her flesh. Riding on radiowaves, PJ's body begins to break down and she slowly becomes a part of the time she has spent traveling."

"An installation starting as a site specific idea and inspired by Lotte Lenya and Nina Simone's well-known appropriation of Kurt Weill's Pirate Jenny - is now my ongoing body of work. Energized by a love of social movement,' Jenny.' has developed out of needing personal inquiry within larger social questions. Jenny as performance, examines History's encounter between pirates and slaves, the layered context of navigation, anarchist theories surrounding their existence and the social mapping and governance of the seas. This historical meeting point of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Golden Age of Pirates unlocks an astounding part of our global history with self reflection on my own personal herstory/narrative as queer, Afro-Carribean/UK born immigrant and "Othered".
- OluShola A. Cole, Artist