Voice Over - 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade by Maria Amidu
Maria Amidu – I’m really interested in the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act because
I did a project quite a few years ago and got really interested in the abolitionists
themselves, particularly Thomas Clarkson because he’s the abolitionist that doesn’t quite
get remembered and he was at the bedrock really of people understanding what was happening
in the Caribbean and the Americas. So I got quite interested in the fact that he had a
chest that was full of instruments of torture, essentially, and he campaigned and travelled
through Britain with this chest, on horse and cart, and basically told the country what
was happening. So I wanted to somehow demonstrate his value and somehow the volume of what he
did because I think it was something like over 30,000 miles that he travelled which
was a pretty mean feat at the time, because you know transport was pretty awful. I wanted
to really demonstrate or represent him, so that’s where the signatures came in so all
the six abolitionists or people that were involved in some aspect of the abolition,
I found their signatures in the Parliamentary Archives and I used a series of translucent
envelopes to emboss their signatures onto and then I chose a political, kind of, I guess
motivational word which demonstrated something, attests to really something of what they did
in the abolitionist movement. So Clarkson’s word is ‘campaign’ and I wanted to include
Gustavas Vassa as well, who’s otherwise known as Olaudah Equiano. So I wanted to make
sure that there’s this kind of breadth of understanding of the people who were involved
in the process of the abolition and even though, I guess Wilberforce is the person who gets
remembered the most because he was a Member of Parliament, he was the one who lobbied,
and his word is ‘lobby’. So each envelope is filled with small strips of paper with
the words printed on in volume and I wanted the words to demonstrate what they did but
also to somehow give a metaphorical sense of the people involved, people who were enslaved
essentially. So the envelopes are photographed on a light box and it means they’ve got
this very, it’s almost like an X-ray, so it’s kind of alluding to the body and the
idea of the fact that people lost their lives particularly in the middle passage and I wanted
people to really get a sense in a very kind of subtle way really, the impact of this history
and the idea that people lost their lives, people elsewhere campaigned and all the signatures
are embossed or foil blocked with a very deep red and that was kind of to be a symbol of
the wax seal stamp and the idea of how a letter was a really strong campaigning tool at the
time and also alluding to the life force of the body i.e. blood, the fact that lots of
people lost their lives and were subjugated in quite horrendous ways and the envelopes
because there is a volume of them all stacked together, for me that was also wanting to
symbolise how people were packed together in the holds of ships in the journey from
Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. I really wanted the envelopes to demonstrate
a number of things in a very subtle way because a lot of people find the history of slavery
and Britain very, very, challenging and uncomfortable so I wanted to do something that was reflective
and enabled people to look at the image in a way that I guess wasn’t kind of confrontational.
It was really important for me that people could kind of connect with it and start thinking
of the nuances and the issues and challenges connected to the history of the slave trade
and its contemporary ramifications I guess. The one thing I’d like people to take away
with them is the fact that I’ve tried to represent a number of individuals who are
not necessarily given the same sort of platform as Wilberforce, and that’s not to say that
Wilberforce wasn’t important, of course he was essential to the process of the Act
being passed but for me it’s about looking at it a bit more holistically so I’d like
people to understand that there were these other men both Africans and Europeans that
were involved in the Abolitionist movement and also for people through the subtlety of
the way that the words are reflected through envelopes to think about what it must have
been like to have been confined in that way in the hold of a ship because I don’t think
many people understand where people were actually stored in inverted commas so I’d really
like them to think about those two things particularly and I’d also like people to
think about their own signature and how their own signature can have a lot of power, so
I mean I know we do lots of things electronically now but the idea of having your signature
and how that can be a mark of protest and campaigning is really important to me.