Yinka Esi Graves & Miguel Ángel Rosales The Coast I Seville (Spain), London (UK)

Filmed in Cape Coast, Ghana, between the forts of Elmina and Cape Coast, The Coast I reflects on a landscape deeply connected to the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Through a site-responsive dance intervention, Yinka Esi Graves explores presence, memory and the traces of lives shaped by forced displacement, creating a powerful dialogue between body, history and place. 

Part of The Disappearing Act: a series of site-responsive interventions, the films emerge from Graves’ exploration of places shaped by colonial discourse. Each one responds to landscapes that hold traces of brutal displacement and erasure, yet often bear few visible signs of the histories they contain.

Through movement, Graves investigates questions of presence, absence and visibility, developing a distinctive choreographic language in dialogue with each site. Rosales’ camera captures these encounters, creating intimate and evocative works that bring body, memory and place into conversation.

Presented together, each film reflects a unique meeting between performer and landscape, revealing how histories can linger within spaces, and how dance can become a way of witnessing, remembering and reimagining what has been obscured.