Kinship in the Wake: On Steve McQueen’s Ashes (2002-2015)

Once in a while, a chance encounter that never had the right conditions to thicken into a relationship nonetheless triggers a seismic shock in its moment of rupture, leaving an indelible and inexplicably deep mark on us. Ashes (2002-2015) by Steve McQueen speaks of one such encounter and unsettles the viewer with its aftershock.

 

In 2002, Steve McQueen visited Grenada to shoot a new film about the island’s native Caribs and their resistance against the French colonizers. It was his first visit to the island in the Caribbean; he was drawn to the place and its colonial history because of his family lineage — Grenada was his parents’ birthplace before they left for the United Kingdom. In the small town of Sauteurs where McQueen was filming, he encountered a young man nicknamed Ashes. “He was charismatic, beautiful, gorgeous… There was something about him,” McQueen recounted in an interview. It naturally followed that he and his cinematographer Robby Müller shot some footage of Ashes on a boat. One easily gets a sense of the charm McQueen spoke about from the grainy and soft super 8 footage. Ashes is a tall, handsome guy with dark skin and is brimming with life. He smiles gaily at the camera, straddling the orange canoe. There is no hint at the identity of this man; but despite being complete strangers to him, we the viewers immediately know that the sea was the milieu that birthed him, simply because he moves with so much grace, even when he loses his balance and momentarily falls into the azure sea. The sun gently settles on his wet skin as he clambers back onto the canoe, giving his back a shimmer that is delicately captured by the super 8. 

 

The footage didn’t make its way into Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep (2002). It was forgotten and buried with heaps of unused materials that artists typically keep. But Ashes was not forgotten: in 2009, McQueen found himself in Grenada again and asked around for his friend, only to learn about his untimely death —merely six weeks after their filming session on the canoe. One day, Ashes chanced upon some drugs on the beach and kept it, planning to sell them somehow to help his family. Sauteurs is a small town though, the drug dealers soon got wind, tracked him down, and shot him dead. 

 

This image of Ashes that is bursting with a life-affirming energy ended up being reactivated by his death. Sitting in a darkened room viewing the shot on a big screen, I could not help but notice its brevity. It is a few minutes long at most and is played in a loop. Over and over again Ashes sits and smiles, looks at the sea pensively, stands up, stumbles, falls in the water, climbs back onto the boat. The repetition felt like a gentle gesture of caressing and cherishing Ashes’ life; the footage is an inadvertent memorabilia of a life senselessly cut short but nonetheless insists on being acknowledged. 

 

The time of life is arrested, barred from moving forward, but in this work there is also the time of death. Both temporalities adhere to a single screen and trouble one another with sound. While I stayed with Ashes as he falls off the boat for the umpteenth time, I grew increasingly aware of a sharp, metallic clinking sound and finally walked towards the other end of the room to investigate. There I encountered the time of death. If the time of life is stalled, the time of death extends, stretches to over twenty minutes, showing meticulously the construction of a tomb. In 2014, McQueen once again returned to Sauteurs and offered to pay for Ashes’ tomb: after he died, Ashes’ family could not afford to build a tomb for him so he was hastily buried in an unmarked grave. 

 

McQueen shot the process of tomb-building. The metallic sounds come from workers hammering away and fastidiously chiseling crosses and other ornamental patterns on to the cement and the marble. The camera lingers very closely on the workers’ hands, capturing the slow, deliberate rhythm of their labor as Ashes’ friend recounts the story of his death in a voiceover. Usually, the responsibility of overseeing the burial falls on the kin of the deceased; in this instance, the act of filmmaking-as-tomb-building perhaps also doubles as an act of kin-making, through which McQueen nurtures a diasporic intimacy with Ashes belatedly. Everything was already too late long before the two even met. At the time of tomb-building, it was impossible to retrieve Ashes’ remains because they could no longer be identified, so the tomb was only meant to be a cenotaph — a container devoid of contents. As Svetlana Boym writes, diasporic intimacy is always belated and never final; “objects and places were lost in the past, and one knows that they can be lost again.” The brief moment of intimacy and belated kinship between McQueen and Ashes is precisely marked by such repeated and irrevocable losses, and with this in mind, I begin to see the double affordance of the work. Separated by a wide temporal gap of twelve years and by a difference in film formats (super 8 vs. 16mm), the footages were nonetheless conjoined on the same screen, ironically making the disjuncture even more conspicuous. Yet this conjoinment also serves as a way to attach Ashes’ body to his tomb on opposite sides of the screen, thus completing — in the field of art — the act of burial not possible in the real-life cemetery. McQueen’s act of care comes too late to prevent death, too late to reclaim the body, but not too late to remember. In Ashes, the image stands in for the lost body, and the screen becomes a resting place for the unclaimed dead. In this way, the work holds space for a kinship built not through prolonged co-presence, but through the act of mourning across time.

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​(2025)