Potential Agrarianisms: Will There Be Sugar After the Rebellion?
A group exhibition at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia
21 August - 31 October
Curated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Excerpt from guide:
“Annalee Davis’s native Barbados was Britain´s first sugar island. Once the wealthiest colony in the English Americas, this is where Britain perfected its colonial machinery via the plantation system, contributing to the modernization of Britain on the back of the transatlantic slave trade and the profitable sugar industry. To realise her new work, A Walker’s Diary – An Effort at Disalienation (2021), Annalee Davis walked in the fields behind her studio on family property, a former sugar cane plantation dating to the seventeenth century, the topographical contours of which form the backdrop for this display. Her findings from regular walks on land steeped in brutal histories are recorded on ledgers salvaged from an abandoned sugar factory. Appropriating their surfaces and countering their economic rationale, this personal diary of reconnections with the land holds the potential for counterknowledges to emerge. The photographic series Sweeping the Fields (2016) documents performative gestures to remember and cleanse the land from its violent past and the ecological damage caused by the monocultural farming of sugar that devastated the biodiversity of the Caribbean island. The wild botanicals which are repopulating the fields point to the possibilities of post-plantation ecological resurgence.”
