Tuesday 15 April: Breaking the Dead Silence revisited
Bristol PRSC 18.30-20.00
Details and tickets here: https://www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/whats-on/prsc/tue-15-apr-breaking-the-dead-silence-127816#e127816
In the lead up to the Bristol Transformed festival, an evening conversation about walking, memorialisation and colonialism. I will be talking about my current practice and building out from contributions to the book published last year. Locating the sites of memory, listening for the spectres, tending the wounded, towards reparative justice.

A walk in Bristol exploring these themes follows on 16 May.

A night time headlight lit journey along Cornwall’s unforgiving sunken stone walled lanes following cues and memorised directions for a dont-trust-the-satnav destination. Arrived in a puddled carpark, engine silenced and lights out. Kestle Barton, we hoped...

Night sight slowly returning we stumbled towards a silhouetted tree and a yard door. It opened. I could see into a kitchen window. People were gathered around a kitchen table.  Holding my breath I knocked on the door, half expecting to come across a family holiday dinner. But the hubbub greeted me and I breathed. We were welcomed and tumbled into a melee of coats off and undoing boots, sharing stories of connection and arrival. Contrary to the visual expectation of cold kitchen flagstones, our toes basked in the delight of underfloor heating.

We had found Kestle Barton.

We were already experiencing Night Tone.

In that warm and sweet smelling kitchen, big pots on the cooker and piles of leaves on the worksurfaces Clare Qualmann opened with words gleaned from the night. The letters forming the words NIGHT TONE were constructed out of bay leaves on the table, in one of those moments when my mind goes totally blank she invited us to offer a word resonating with the night. Out of the silence someone offered ‘star’ and we were off the participatory hook and it began. Clare swept up the leaf letters and put them in one of the pots on the stove and as she talked began to construct STAR in bay leaves, upside down, ‘the curves are the hardest’ she said. New words were offered and more leaf letters put into the pot of boiling water. The smell of bay permeated the room and as we moved with Clare to other leaf letter constructions, the scent drifted with us. I lost myself in a reverie of the house where I had grown up and where the same steamy smell of bay would drift from the kitchen on Boxing Day when my mother would cook a ham.

Clare made words with plants and talked about her process. Words made with bracken fronds, brittle, delicate, fragile. The dried leaf filigree spelt out both in positive and in negative. Where the fronds formed an outline of a word that you could only just make out it seemed to fizz and move: fragile in meaning and material. She invited us to contribute and I drifted back to find a word for my mum in the kitchen. A powerful and gentle opener for a dreamy evening.

Claire Hind, dressed like Tenniel’s Alice in a shimmering dark green dress filled by white petticoats, invited us to join her in a small darkened room beside the firelit lounge. Slow sounds/music brought us into the room, the scent of the bay became part of the ambience and the chatter subsided. The cave-like space glowed with projected images from the residency. At first we seemed too big and too many but like Alice we squeezed in and the room accommodated us.

Claire moved in the shadow close up against the wall beside projected images of her in the same dress mirroring and merging with stone. Above Claire’s head there was a small grill letting in light from the outside, her slow movement a gesture towards eternity enmeshed in rock. The slide show became a loop of two images, one abstracted and one of Claire’s body enveloping a large rock on the shore. The colour of the dress, the ripples and folds made by the fabric and her body resonating with and amplifying those of the stone. She read from the house visitors book riffing from previous comments and reports into a longer story from their shared residency. An encounter with Eric out clearing the fields; he polishes his car and cuts his lawn. Eric, we learned, is a shaman. This beautiful spoken piece starting in the well-worn phrases of airbnb visitors and seamlessly drifted through found and imagined stories and spectres of the residency at Kestle Barton.

Claire reached up to the small grill to end the spell and we returned to the fire lit room and the next stage of our night journey.

We gathered in front of the fire, but our attention was turned to look outside, behind us. Looking out the old window into the night I was again reminded of the lost home of my childhood.

I could see the stars and the moon, Orion just revealed from behind the clouds. Saba Zavarei moved out of the darkness and into the space, her face just lit by a torch from inside. We pressed up close to the window as Saba moved on the dark grass in the moon and star light. She held large white stones in the palm of her hands, reaching up with them and drawing down. Long strong slow movement stretching to the sky, the white stones became stars plucked from the sky, I imagined them placed in the same configuration as the constellation. The shape completed, she stepped towards us and began singing in a language I did not understand but sounded to my Western European ears as if from the Middle East. A song about land and solidarity and connection, diaspora and return, I thought it was Palestinian. Looking out from the warm firelit room through the small window panes into the dark night, the movement and song lingered in the space. Saba had disappeared into the darkness. An emotional pause held our applause, the silence broken by an insistent banging on the door.

The knock on the door of return, the request for assistance, asylum, welcome? Who were we as hearers of that demand for entry in the night? Saba returned and joined us in the room with the fire to our applause. The song was from Saba’s home, Iran; she shared a story of exile and resistance.

Finally the three artists gave us a script for a walk into the night from Kestle Barton. In the fire flickering darkness Claire, Clare and Saba read us cues and located provocations for a walk along the shore of Frenchman’s Creek as dusk turns to night. A sound walk for voices growing out of their residency to be left as a new layer of memory and presence. A wonderful, calming, integrating close to the performance.

..and then we ate together at the table by the fire, vegetable stew and lentils from Iran. It felt like we talked until late and maybe the dawn was rising as we left. Time slips at night.

Memoryscapes are both personal and shared, we each have a patchwork of memories of feelings, smells, sounds, encounters with creatures, places and plants that make a map of the world we inhabit. Memoryscapes are also corporate and institutional, manipulated by those in authority to generate particular narratives and to silence and disable others. My creative work, walking and asking questions, attends to both the personal and the institutional. In both respects the toppling statue of Edward Colston looms over the book Breaking the Dead Silence, the idea for the publication conceived in the immediate aftermath of the June 2020 events. Responding to an open call, nineteen diverse authors contributed: activists, academics, historians and heritage professionals. Each chapter explores, directly or indirectly, a response, commentary or experience in the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd and the renewal of the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide.

The title references Jane Austen’s description of ‘the dead silence’, a closed down conversation, a silence that is not allowed to become an argument, in which there is no fuel for contestation or any further sound of agreement or disagreement. At the time the events of 2020 appeared to shatter the prevailing silence on white supremacism and the legacies of chattel slavery and colonialism; a new richer, more honest, more open heritage narrative appeared to be emerging, even in Bath. Chapters in the book discuss some of those initiatives in the changing memoryscape. My own chapter, however, with a first draft completed in the autumn of that year became less optimistic, I recount my experience in Bath, from delivering a commissioned cycle of walks in Bath’s Sydney Gardens to a walk being cancelled.

As dust settled on the drying out statue lying in the dark of a Bristol museum warehouse I received a phone call withdrawing a commission for an intervention at the gala reopening of Sydney Gardens. I was informed that the content of the walk was  ‘inappropriate for such a celebratory event’. I reflected on how, once the lever of National Lottery funding is removed, Bath’s white parochial fragility returns and the pervasive silence rises up elegantly, discretely closing out the uncomfortable. Exhibitions disappear to become foot notes on websites, video links dropped, information sheets locked away. This was the case following the Lottery funded 2007 commemoration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade exhibitions at The Holburne and at Beckford’s Tower; it remains to be seen if recent muted acknowledgements in the city will go the same way.

Despite the frisson that the toppling of the Colston Statue sent through the heritage institutions of Bath, acknowledgement or apology of any kind from these institutions has yet to find a permanent voice, least of all from the custodians of Bath’s UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Acknowledgement and apology for chattel slavery and the other atrocities of colonialism are widely recognised as the first essential steps towards psychological, cultural and financial repair. Professor Olivette Otele wrote about ‘reluctant’ sites of memory: places whose custodians deny or obscure connections with a particular uncomfortable or contested past, where mourning and reflection is made difficult or acts of remembrance prevented.

Reluctant Sites of Memory are mirrors into our past and present. They are oblique but powerful reflections of our abilities to forget, remember and create knowledge despite social, cultural and economic impediments.  (Otele 2018)

Other academics have written about how these haunted and wounded places teem with unheard voices and stories. Over these past ten years as an artist-researcher, walking and asking questions I have learned about colonial exploitation, forced migration and looting, all hidden in plain sight in Bristol and Bath. From Bath’s UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and the old port of Bristol to the coastal cities of the UK and beyond, public sites of memory have yet to fully acknowledge the atrocities committed in the creation of the wealth they manifest.

In 2014 for the opening of Bath Spa University’s Commons building at Newton Park, I presented an installation using media gathered collaboratively on a walk between the old brassmill at Saltford and Clevedon Pools, Bath. The brassmills along the River Avon were, in many respects, the mint for the trade in West African people’s lives, producing, amongst other items, brass manillas, wearable wealth, the currency of the slave trade. The wealth generated through the labour of those enslaved is embodied in Bath where slaveowners came to play, network and bathe. Walking beside the river we made visceral, watery connections: water drove the mills that made the brass items, these items were transported via water, as were the enslaved Africans, water irrigated the sugar and it was water, hot and cold, that their enslavers enjoyed in Bath. Millions of Africans died in the long years of the TransAtlantic Traffic those forced onto the ships and became ill or resisted or both were thrown overboard into the Atlantic Ocean, flesh, bones and memory in the sea. Whether it is the rain that falls cool over Bath or that which seeps down to hot rocks to return as hot springs, that rain comes off the Atlantic.  As poet, Derek Walcott wrote, The Sea is History (2008)

Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed (2010) and others it is my view that to be part of the constructed amnesia and the forgetting of injustice is to become complicit in its persistence. Racism and its inverse, white supremacism, became structural through the TransAtlantic Traffic in Enslaved Africans and fundamental to European colonialism. My view, as a white man, is that without reaching back to and owning that past Britain remains shackled to it. Making a way, walking and asking questions, I attend to complicity, racialisation and white privilege; I seek to become more alert, this non-confrontational somatic approach is my way of sharing that becoming.

Together in those reluctant sites of memory, listening, sense-ing, asking questions with our whole bodies we find ways of hearing the unheard, of discovering and renewing the telling of forgotten stories. Our conversations often turn to the long lasting legacies of enslavement and colonial extraction and its fundamental impact on how we make sense of ourselves and the world.  Walkers disseminate this even if only as questions, for these individuals and for many others that includes urgent questions on offering and demanding apology.

Bath Spa University, as the heritage custodian of two if not three sites begging for an acknowledgement of the wealth they represent, has  much to consider. At Newton Park, standing on the shoulders of other labourers in the archive, I hosted a walk for Heritage Open Days in September. We were promised a cream tea at the end and although I had to up sell it, the potential juxtaposition was pregnant with possibilities for a delicious closing provocation. I opened the walk with David Dabydeen’s comment (2008) that there is an inextricable link between the English Country Estate and the Caribbean Plantation. We followed entangled threads to touch the stone of the Big House, the lawn grass and the field grass. We looked for the ghost of the Monkey Puzzle tree and came as close as we could, over electric fences and pink picnic blankets, to the great spreading Cedar of Lebanon. Back then on the brink of a war rooted in European colonialism and remote public school biblical cartography, we thought about what the tree represented, we felt its rugged bark and looked up into the cathedral of its branches. Walking to the lake in silence through wet woods towards distant proud mournfulness of Paul Robeson singing. I dropped in the stories of the three intermarried enslaver white dynasties, the Gores, the Langtons and the multibarrelled Temples who once owned the estate, a direct thread of inherited wealth all the way to Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers and the founding of the Royal Africa Company. Both institutions actively engaged in the trade in captured and enslaved African people, the latter established in 1660 by King Charles 2nd, whose descendant and namesake is currently on the throne and owns the Newton Park estate. We felt the cut letters of his name in the grey commemorative stone on the library wall and thought about the absence of memorialisation for those whose lives were destroyed by the Royal Africa Company.

On our return, beside the lake and enjoying the picturesque, as we stood before a tree planted in memory of lost trees and lost memories of the struggle for women's right to vote. A closing question posed by a tree. Once, the other side of Bath, a hundred years ago, there was an arboretum, each tree planted by a suffragette recovering from imprisonment, forced feeding and hunger strike. Today that park at the rear of Eagle House is a housing estate. Once, at Newton Park, not so long ago, by the lake, this tree was planted to remember that erasure and commemorate the struggle. Today there is no orientation, no bench upon which to sit, to reflect on a social justice story and remember the price paid for the vote. I hope the group of walkers left with that story mnemonically linked to the tree by the lake, that they retell it and keep asking questions.

Out of cognitive dissonance on that short afternoon’s walk, quiet acknowledgements of the atrocities obscured by the picturesque emerged. Remembering through our senses, becoming story carriers I hope those walkers continue walking on, emboldened to ask ever more difficult questions. We offered respect to the memory of flesh, blood and water in Dabydeen’s inextricable link. The question of apology, offered and demanded, was in the air along with the hope and desire for repair. We ended with a brisk climb up from the lake on time and hungry for the promised cream tea, ready to ask questions on the origins of the fruit, sugar and cream. It was four o’clock, tea time!

But the cream teas were done for the day

Two ghostly white men in white wigs and frock coats drifted past.

and it was left to me to make the apologies.

Christina Horvath and myself will headline the Clevedon LitFest, Celebration of the Book, on Sat 2 November. I'll be hosting a conversation exploring the publication process, talking about our individual contributions and why we did it.  Do join us!
More details and tickets here

The book is available as a free download but if you would like to get your own hard copy at a significant discount the code is 27BREAKING , valid until the end of October from the publishers website:
Breaking the Dead Silence Engaging with the Legacies of Empire and Slave-Ownership in Bath and Bristol’s Memoryscapes.

Contributing a sound track made from walks in Sydney Gardens, Bath and the Botanic Gardens in Adelaide. Echoes and resonances of the work in South Australia last year beginning to seep into the work. Listen to the birds. The white settlers didnt like the sound of the indigeneous birds so they imported English song birds whilst exporting the bones of the indigenous people. Colonial extraction at its most brutal. Re-reading Fanon again.

A circular walk towards and through the site of the former Inglescombe Nursery (Wares) from Bath City Farm to From the Land and back. A memorable day. This write up has been a long time coming. Maybe because it took place on April Fools Day, No fools walking on this though! The report below is ghosted from an interview I gave for a colleague in the Research Office at Bath Spa University, many thanks for the hard work doing the write up.

Read the article here or scroll through below

Wednesday 22 February 2023 19.00-20.30 @ BRLSI Elwin Room
Colonial and Botanical Heritage in Two Spa Towns:
Bath in Britain and Bath in Jamaica. A talk by Dr Christina Horvath

This talk seeks to decrypt the colonial connections of two spa towns of the same name, Bath in Somerset, England, and Bath in the parish of St Thomas, Jamaica and explore how their environment and green spaces have been impacted by their shared colonial history. Bath in Somerset benefited from profit drawn from enslaved labour in sugar plantations in the Caribbean to create an attractive neo-Palladian cityscape with outstanding landscape architecture whose ‘universal value’ was recognized by UNESCO in 1987. Bath in Jamaica, in contrast, witnessed colonisation and anti-colonial struggle which resulted in the creation of spa facilities and a botanical garden but also in the destruction of some of the original botanical heritage as well as some of the built heritage. The comparison of both hot springs provides opportunities for a reflection on present-day inequalities within the heritage sector. 

The talk is free join in person in Bath(UK) or online. Register here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/colonial-and-botanical-heritages-in-two-spa-towns-tickets-462001126807

Botanical Encounters  8 March:
On the Resilience of the Dead Silence and the Crisis of Imagination

Wednesday 8th March 2023 19.00-20.30 @ BRLSI, Elwin Room
On the Resilience of the Dead Silence and the Crisis of Imagination: Walking and Asking Questions in Bath’s Sydney Gardens. A talk by Dr Richard White

In her 1814 novel, Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s offers a fictional account of how a conversation on slave-ownership was closed down through ‘dead silence’.  Between 2019 and 2021 Dr Richard White hosted a series of non-fictional walks, Botany Empire and Deep Time, traversing Sydney Gardens, where Austen famously once walked. The commission from the Lottery funded Sydney Gardens project generated three walking guides, numerous public walks and a performance at the Bath Tree-weekender in 2021.  In this presentation Richard will share some of the suppressed knowledges and unheard stories emerging from his work; he will discuss the reception of the walks in the context of the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol and Bath’s UNESCO World Heritage status. Two hundred years after the publication of Mansfield Park, the presentation asks the question, how resilient is the ‘dead silence’ and why should we care?

The talk is free to join in person in Bath(UK) or online. Register here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-the-resilience-of-the-dead-silence-and-the-crisis-of-imagination-tickets-462004015447

Botanical Encounters March 11: a walk
The following Saturday March 11 a walk is presented as a follow up to this presentation, the walk reprises one which was cancelled as unsuitable for the Gala Reopening of Sydney Gardens in 2022.
More details here

The walk is also free but places are strictly limited and registration is essential. Register here
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-the-resilience-of-the-dead-silence-and-the-crisis-of-imagination-a-walk-tickets-462036051267


Talks and walks are presented as part of Botanical Encounters. The project aims to disentangle Bath’s often overlooked colonial legacies by looking at the impact of colonial voyages and conquest, imperial science, botanical and arts collections and the global displacement of plants and humans. More here

Tracing feral routes and ecologies
between the site of Ware’s Nursery and Bath City Farm;

Prospecting for local histories of growing;
Exploring the potential of regenerative farming.

A scoping and capacity building project November 2022 to April 2023 nurturing conversations and networks through the development and delivery of a public walk connecting across the Whiteway Road in Bath

Building on the creative and collaborative working practices of Blooming Whiteway and Bath City Farm and exploring the spectral presence of Ware’s Nurseries, Tulips and Tractors will explore local human and more-than-human networks, horticultural and agricultural histories and relationships with the land. The project contributes to a learning relationship with Bath Spa University towards funded activity sharing knowledge and building local resilience and capacity. 

Tulips and Tractors aims to

• Initiate and contribute to critical creative conversations on belonging, social justice and the land in a time of climate breakdown and cost of living crisis.

 

• Investigate processes and initiate activity gathering, imagining and articulating local non-human presences, feral routes through connected urban and urban fringe green spaces

 

• Initiate, build, extend and stimulate networks, communication and collaboration across both sides of the Whiteway Road towards further funded Knowledge Exchange activity. 

 

• Share and prototype participatory practices and approaches as part of a collaborative Knowledge Exchange project.

Activity:
Tulips and Tractors is focused on the development and delivery of a circular walk. An informal identification of possible wildlife pathways crossing human constructed boundaries will inform the route of a curated walk. Engagement is built through mapping, walking and asking questions, identifying connected green spaces and informal commons. Gathering stories, artwork, local memories and wildlife data will open conversations on place and belonging as well as issues of land use, land ownership, horticulture and agriculture.