“Rock, water, fire, air. Rock, water, fire, air…” The chant begins like a child’s game — light, rhythmic, playful. In Nursery Rhymes. (Holy) Water (2025), performers in delicate white garments move through a photography studio, the tempo quickening, the tone shifting.

Beneath this pulse lies the story of three African girls — Asue*, Gambra*, Schiama* — forcibly baptised on July 29, 1855, in Bruneck, South Tyrol. The ceremony, in truth, was also erasure: names replaced, identities severed, power extended through religion, mission activity, and profit.

Kazeem-Kamiński’s lens refuses this script. The girls, renamed Johanna, Angela, and Aloisia at their baptism, return our gaze and ask, “What sins, we ask, what did we do?” They do not submit — they confront.

Shot on 16mm, the film folds past and present, restaging moments from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. It becomes an act of Black sisterhood, reclaiming agency where the archive is silent.

“Rock, water, fire, air. Rock, water, fire, air…” The chant begins like a child’s game — light, rhythmic, playful. In Nursery Rhymes. (Holy) Water (2025), performers in delicate white garments move through a photography studio, the tempo quickening, the tone shifting.

Beneath this pulse lies the story of three African girls — Asue*, Gambra*, Schiama* — forcibly baptised on July 29, 1855, in Bruneck, South Tyrol. The ceremony, in truth, was also erasure: names replaced, identities severed, power extended through religion, mission activity, and profit.

Kazeem-Kamiński’s lens refuses this script. The girls, renamed Johanna, Angela, and Aloisia at their baptism, return our gaze and ask, “What sins, we ask, what did we do?” They do not submit — they confront.

Shot on 16mm, the film folds past and present, restaging moments from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. It becomes an act of Black sisterhood, reclaiming agency where the archive is silent.