Darryl Daley is a London-born moving image artist and filmmaker of Afro-Caribbean heritage. He works predominantly within film, moving image, photography and graphic design.

His practice merges both mythology and ideology surrounding Blackness — expressed through aesthetic and profound exploration of identity and collective experiences across the Black Atlantic. His multidisciplinary artistic approach employs the spirit of surrealism through an Afro-Caribbean gaze, investigating Black matriarchal social structures, themes of inheritance, genetic memory and concepts relating to the re-purposing of the past. In this pursuit, Darryl utilises a candid introspective act of archiving and visual anthropology, incorporating photography and field recording as catalysts for storytelling and threads to question identity, spirituality, culture and history.

The artist’s practice bridges film, sound, graphic design and photographic materials, giving birth to bold moving image works of a semiotic language, dissecting the power of juxtaposition and collage. This emphasis on multimedia challenges traditional modes of narrating and activates sensible points and nuances of Blackness and the Black body as a vessel of ancestral technologies.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
“Revival 24” captures a profound moment where, through the spirit, the Black male body is liberated from a singular notion of masculinity and the constraints of time and space.

Resonating with the CIRCA 20:24 manifesto’s call to break free, the film presents an alternative reality where the modern and archival coexist through non-linear time. The use of repetition and movement affirms a circular existence, transcending traditional constraints of a beginning and an end, and instead embracing boundless fluidity within the moving image.

The historical context of Revivalism in Jamaica—a creolization of African spirituality and Christianity—symbolizes Black resistance, resonating with the manifesto’s reference to historical cycles and liberation struggles. This historical consciousness in “Revival 24” disrupts conventional modes of being and envisions a decolonized counter-visuality, aligning with the manifesto’s invitation to “rupture the cycles of normality.”

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
“GOD SAVE OUR QUEEN” (Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood). This project examines the parallels between the matriarchal system within my own family structure and the folklore of “Queen Nanny,” the leader of the Windward Maroons of Jamaica.

The concept for the film emerged after discovering Hi8 footage of my grandmother’s (also known as Nanny) 60th birthday. The footage captures a cake-cutting ceremony within her overcrowded kitchen of 40 years, displaying a spectacle as she offers a slice of her birthday cake to each of her 10 children and 30 grandchildren, symbolising inheritance, kinship, and communion.

This discovery led me to further research the life of Nanny the Maroon. I found that she is mentioned only in three archived documents from 1733, 1735, and 1739, the latter marking the signing of the first Maroon treaty with the British Colonial government. My idea is to reimagine these archives as a series of theatrical acts inspired by Kole Omotoso’s book “The Theatrical into Theatre.”

The family footage further reveals a thread between the Holy Communion of Christianity and African spiritual symbolism. This intersection deepened my interest in acts of resistance through spirituality, as developed across the Caribbean and Americas among peoples of African heritage.

The outcome of this project would be a three-channel moving image installation. Each channel would separately explore the themes of lineage, spirituality, and resistance, collectively creating a work of immaterial archive.

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