Morning Raid by Ivan Forde
Morning Raid is a cyanotype from one work from Forde’s Illumination series (2016-2018), which incorporates the Epic of Gilgamesh to explore multiplicity and diversity using the black body as the subject of poetical narrative. Forde was in part inspired by Eternity to Season, a collections of poems written by British-Guyanese author Sir Wilson Harris in 1954. In some of these poems, Harris transforms characters from the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh into different facets of the self set within villages on the Guyana coastline. Similarly, Forde uses photomontage to insert himself into the cyanotype's dream-like merging of past and present, fantasy and fact. By placing himself within the poetic narrative, Forde retells old stories for contemporary life.
Morning Raid, which features a series of self-portraits working together to bring down the largest tree, references the story of the cedar forest in Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In pursuit of fame and immortality, Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu raze a pristine forest of tall, straight cedar trees, and murder its spirit-protector, Humbaba. While the poem may be fictional, it describes a story that is familiar throughout history and today: the theft of natural resources, and the ejection (or killing) of the land’s indigenous caretakers. As well as being our oldest work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh is also the earliest literary record of environmental injustice.
