About this Event
How do you know my mother?
One of many questions that I would ask over the course of three days—sitting with five of my mother’s eight sisters, gathered around her mother’s round large oak table in the middle of her kitchen. Her absence looms the largest around the holidays—particularly that stretch of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas and then the day after Christmas, which is her birthday.
Who do the people we love become in our memory in their absence? And what might it look like to render for ourselves a new composite of their image? To fill in the gaps through shared, unheard remembrances from people who knew them differently.
I knew my mother—I wanted to know more about the woman.
I have always been fascinated by my Granny’s kitchen and the kitchen table’s role in our lives as Black folk. The kitchen for me is both place and portal and it serves as the primary backdrop for my film, All The Space You Cannot See. Through this special screening, which I have defined as a Black, Oralgraphical-documentary—one that requires slow listening and intimate looking at images, I invite you to come and sit with them and travel with them, wherever you think them to be. These are images imbued with the textures of love, joy and laughter but also grief.
Memories, much like our bones can be fractured or dislocated and there are few processes more difficult than an attempt to fuse together those memories that have been dislodged from us—the ones we know that exist but live outside of our body and in the bodies of others. Finding them and realigning them together across space, place and time and them working as an adhesive for the heart and mind and that acting as medicine, for a more communal kind of healing.
We’ll explore together the ways in which space and location coalesce to form containers for our memories. And how our ways of gathering as Black folk, are essential for our continued wellbeing. My aim is to provide you with a model for your own interpretations in the hope that you might attend to and observe your own Black, interior worlds and call attention to the spaces in your lives that you cannot see but know and feel.
This event is part of a year-long series: Keeping Memory: Oral History Practices that Host Kin and Community. A keep is a place to hold what is both precious and intimate. In the oral history practices featured in this series, kin memories are held in trust, in wisdom, in ritual, in heritage, and in each other. These projects think beyond the one-to-one interview encounter, gathering the embodied experience of kin, families, and communities. Each asks what needs to be remembered, and who needs to remember.
This series is curated by Nyssa Chow and hosted in partnership with two institutes of community memory: this fall at in Central Brooklyn, a historic site preserving one of the largest free Black communities in pre–Civil War America; and this spring at , a Puerto Rican and Latinx cultural home on the Lower East Side.
About Jeary "Sylves" Payne
Jeary "Sylves" Payne is a multidisciplinary artist, telling stories across mediums. Based in Brooklyn, NY, by way of Phoenix, Arizona, since 2015. He is a musician, writer, orator, and photographer. He is interested in documenting scenes that capture the nuance and micro-moments of Black life and the experiences of real people. He serves full-time as an Associate Educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he oversees the museum’s Teen Programs division. A recent graduate from Columbia University, where he received his Master of Arts in Oral History in 2025.
Event venue & nearby stays
Weeksville Heritage Center, 158 Buffalo Avenue, Brooklyn, United States
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