On Ghosts and The Moving Image: Edward George’s Black Atlas

When I meet him on a gloomy winter afternoon via Zoom, Edward George speaks in constellations. Every story begets a world of its own – relationships, references and connections that paint a fuller picture. Context is everything. In 2024 the artist was invited on a year-long residency at the Warburg Institute to engage with The Image of the Black archive, a photographic collection of paintings, sculpture, manuscripts, decorative arts, and other vernacular objects depicting people of African descent, initiated by French-American art collectors Dominique and John de Menil in the 1960s.

The resulting body of work, Black Atlas, comprises a 57-minute film and three triptychs by Edward George. The film sifts through images in an attempt to make explicit the ways of seeing that have shaped visual culture and continue to haunt contemporary understandings of race. The triptychs are made up of collaged images: zoomed in, blown up, warped, and organized thematically in reference to the late art historian Aby Warburg’s method of associative thinking. It takes the form of Warburg’s unfinished project Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, an image atlas named after the Greek goddess of memory. Black Atlas maps the logic of the archive across time and renders looking a conscious act of reckoning with the past.

Yaa Addae: The collection has over 30,000 images, so I imagine a breadth of research went into creating the film and accompanying triptychs. One of the editorial themes for C& this year is the role of the artist in collecting and making knowledge legible, which you do across mediums. What is your relationship to archives?

Edward George: My relationship to the archive is that of a detective but also a crate digger. With Black Atlas I didn’t go in with any preconceptions. The archive had been housed in the Warburg Institute basement and hadn’t been seen for quite some time, if at all. So my relationship to it would have been as the person to make something of it as it enters the public eye, a bit like dragging a drowning person out of turbulent waters and attempting to resuscitate them. Nobody had ever looked at all of the images in the archive. Why would they? There are between 30 and 40,000 of them. One of the last things [Warburg] does is a project called Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, where he has this idea that you can trace the movement of motifs in images across time. Before he does all of this, he becomes a victim of mental illness. So there’s something to do with trauma both in the ambience of the Bilderatlas project and in the actuality of the Menil archive. We spoke quite early about what this thing was going to be and I didn’t know, but I knew it would be poetic. I used to make films in a group called the Black Audio Film Collective, and I’m a child of Chris Marker, so I was very into using archives in a way that transformed but also reaffirmed their relation to actuality.

YA: Something that stood out to me was the title cards in between the various sections of the film. What was your process of categorizing these images?

EG: I went from 30,000 to a couple of thousand, whittling it down continuously. Before I did that, I was still thinking of how you relate the silence of the images to the history of cinema. So I watched a couple of silent films, many by Buster Keaton. I read an interview with him where he goes on to say that in comedies, the fewer intertitles you have, the more the relationship between the writing, the blackness of the empty screen, and the drama can unfold. So big up to Buster Keaton.

Then I took a leaf from Warburg’s thinking. I thought, if there are these motifs that repeat themselves through time, I’ll let the motifs come to me. I did similar things with [the thinking of] Jacques Lacan, Saidiya Hartman, and the wonderful Fred Moten – big yourself up all the time Fred.

YA: The music was subtle but a core part of the film, specifically the drums which seemed to mimic the pace of going through the archive and the saxophone whistles, at times discordant and almost unsettling. Can you tell me more about the intentions behind the score?

EG: I am a huge fan of the work of Crystabel Efemena Riley and Seymour Wright. I’m in a group with both of them. What I hear [in their music] is an intimacy that sidesteps the seductions of romanticism as they pertain to avant-garde music. So it’s not sentimental. It’s not lyrical. It’s not even free jazz. There’s nothing you can whistle. It’s that distance from the romantic tradition coupled with the way in which they foreground a closeness that gave me the feeling that whatever they did would somehow shelter the collection: the constellation of voices through which the film’s voice spoke itself.

YA: Speaking of sheltering, what did protecting yourself look like while engaging with an archive that holds violent images?

EG: This is the irony of the Menils’ thinking. The more you gather images that make a claim on beauty, the more you also get the visualization of horror.

Well, there are a couple of ways. The protection was the method. If you move quickly [through the images], something won’t catch you. This came from Claude Debussy’s thinking on music criticism, where he says that he’s engaging with music by way of the first thing that hits him: the impressions, the imprint the thing makes on him, the sensation that takes place, that’s what he’s going with.

There was one moment after I’d done the bulk of the research, when I dreamt of one of the images, the branding of a Negress. In the space between waking and sleeping, I felt that burn. I realized that my job was to confer not just agency on these non-existent presences or non-presences, but to get them to be in a way that even when they were being deployed as bodies in photographic spaces, they got something a bit more. How can I move you from this frame? How can I get you to fly around this archive and be all these things that in real life you weren’t given the time to even imagine or become? So you protect yourself up to a point, in order to bring into life and protect these folks. 

YA: There are several institutions doing work around having artists respond to or even attempt to repair their collections dealing with difficult histories. What structural work can be done to extend this beyond revisiting archives and into rethinking institutional foundations and how they operate today?

EG: The main thing now, if you’re a U.S. institution that houses anything to do with DEI, you’re at war. We're living in a moment when all of the claims of the embrace of difference are under threat. In the case of British institutions, the game is to resist the incursions of that contemporary thinking from the U.S. in their dealings with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Make your institutions public. Make the contents of your institutions public. Go pop. Make them the contents of future crate-digging. Get kids in, get schools in, get old people in, get homeless people in, and get artists in to give new meaning to the contents of your archive. Again, its somebody who's almost drowned and is on the beach, and we’re breathing life into them. They’re not dead, but we can help them get their breath back. Get us to do that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Edward George: Black Atlas is on view at the Warburg Institute, London, through 31 January 2026.