Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has made the journey from Cuba to America, continuing the displacement begun when her Yoruba ancestors were shipped from Nigeria as slaves. Her work traces the histories of people for whom the past is not as distant as we might like to think. Campos-Pons's grandfather was transported to Cuba to work on the Vega sugar plantation and her family was still living and working on the plantation when she was growing up. With an oral tradition that kept their connection to Africa very much alive, the artist's friends and family were a living testament to this history of displacement.
The Seven Powers Came by the Sea (1992) deals with this history. The Seven Powers are based on templates for the stowing of slaves on the transport ships that once sailed from West Africa to the Caribbean after trading manufactured goods brought from Liverpool. The layout of the bodies on the slave boards is a powerful image of the conjunction of mathematical efficiency and brutality.
Campos-Pons also uses photography, film and video in her work. At Bluecoat Art Centre the seven slave boards are leant against the wall, evoking the Yoruba deities transposed to the new world. On the floor in front of them texts and small framed photographs of African Cubans are arranged in groups like family photographs. There is a further suggestion of headstones or silent memorials to the generations uprooted and separated by the slave trade.
Objects associated with forced labour often accompany these memorials. Unfolding Desires (1997) comprises seven old wooden ironing boards placed in a spiral arrangement, each stacked with neatly folded white sheets. The worn and chipped boards retain the traces of many years of repetitive domestic labour while the shape and rhythmic arrangement of the boards suggest transatlantic passage. This piece also includes two monitors installed flush with the wall. Like the photographic mementos in Seven Powers, the images on the monitors record and commemorate the descendants of those displaced by slavery.
[LESS]Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has made the journey from Cuba to America, continuing the displacement begun when her Yoruba ancestors were shipped from Nigeria as slaves. Her work traces the histories of people for whom the past is not as distant as we might like to think. Campos-Pons's grandfather was transported to Cuba to work on the Vega sugar plantation and her family was still living and working on the plantation when she was growing up. With an oral tradition that kept their connection to Africa very much alive, the artist's friends and family were a living testament to this history of displacement.
The Seven Powers Came by the Sea (1992) deals with this history. The Seven Powers are based on templates for the stowing of slaves on the transport ships that once sailed from West Africa to the Caribbean after trading manufactured goods brought from Liverpool. The layout of the bodies on the slave boards is a powerful image of the conjunction of mathematical efficiency and brutality.
Campos-Pons also uses photography, film and video in her work. At Bluecoat Art Centre the seven slave boards are leant against the wall, evoking the Yoruba deities transposed to the new world. On the floor in front of them texts and small framed photographs of African Cubans are arranged in groups like family photographs. There is a further suggestion of headstones or silent memorials to the generations uprooted and separated by the slave trade.
Objects associated with forced labour often accompany these memorials. Unfolding Desires (1997) comprises seven old wooden ironing boards placed in a spiral arrangement, each stacked with neatly folded white sheets. The worn and chipped boards retain the traces of many years of repetitive domestic labour while the shape and rhythmic arrangement of the boards suggest transatlantic passage. This piece also includes two monitors installed flush with the wall. Like the photographic mementos in Seven Powers, the images on the monitors record and commemorate the descendants of those displaced by slavery.
