Amazonian Brazil and the Bohee Brothers

Blog series Americas and Oceania

The British Library’s collections have long been sources of information, inspiration and ideas for artists, as well as academics and researchers working on more traditional writing projects.

The Eccles Institute’s Creative Fellowship programme was established in 2025 to give dedicated support two projects each year which explore the Americas collections with an artist’s eye, and this year we are excited to welcome the artist-led studio Invisible Flock and London-based sonic librarian and multimedia artist Jess Rowley.

Invisible Flock and Vandria Borari

Invisible Flock is a multi-award-winning artist-led studio founded in 2009, which will be using the Library’s collections across various formats — including printed books, manuscripts, official publications, maps, newspapers, sounds and digital — to trace the historical, ecological, political, social and economic development of the Lower Tapajós River, one of the Amazon’s major Brazilian tributaries.

Led by artist and studio Co-Founder Victoria Pratt and Research Officer Jessica Sim, the project will be developed in collaboration with Vandria Borari, an Indigenous leader, activist, Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.), and ceramic artist based in the Borari Territory in Alter do Chão, Lower Tapajós. Invisible Flock and Vandria Borari have worked together on past projects including 2023’s This is a Forest. This Fellowship with the British Library represents a moment in a longer-term commitment by both artists to ongoing global collaboration and exchange as vital creative strategies in the age of climate breakdown.

Their focus for this Fellowship will be an exploration of how this river, the rainforest and its peoples have been impacted by colonialism, capitalism and the climate crisis, in particular centring stories of women from region’s Indigenous communities, and considering how access to freshwater has changed over the past 30 years due to escalating droughts.

Working towards a series of creative interventions including digital art and performance, this project will be shaped by a continent-spanning process of researching, learning and making between multiple sites including the Library in London, the studio in Yorkshire, and the artists and communities in Brazil. It will aim to offer a new perspective on the intersecting crises of land rights, climate change and modernity experienced in Amazonia, and their resonances for citizens in the UK.

Jess Rowley

Jess Rowley is a London-based librarian and multimedia artist whose research practice explores decolonial approaches to archiving, editing and interpreting Black musical heritages. Her project with the Eccles Institute will be an elaboration and deepening of her longstanding fascination with the Bohee Brothers – a Black Canadian banjo playing duo who took London by storm in the closing decades of the 19th century.

Building on her ongoing research, in which she reinterprets the lost wax cylinder recordings of the Bohee Brothers and other missing early sonic artifacts, her work at the British Library will explore the wider discography and theatrical ephemera of Afro-diasporic artists who played throughout Britain’s music halls and port cities between 1880 and 1910.

This project will contribute to a growing awareness of the influence of Black travellers and touring musicians like the Bohee Brothers to the British popular music canon. It will also critically engage with the practices and institutions of Black music research, critiquing archival misattributions and chasing down catalogue ghosts. Rowley’s creative work will expand into the development of resources that map webs of influence, taking the form of audiovisual cartographies illustrating the journeys, compositions, performance ephemera, venues, and recording devices. The Fellowship will also generate essays and a live sonic lecture performance in collaboration with sound artist and composer afromerm, with these outputs contributing to Wikipedia editing workshops facilitated by the Ghost Edit Group (part of the Decolonising Wikipedia Network).