stirring @ the international festival of the sea

40.000 sugar packets distributed in cafes,
bars & hotels within the festival boundary.

An intervention negotiated to draw attention to an essential aspect of Bristols maritime history which was largely elided in the Festival celebrations.

Bristol’s maritime heritage is a multi-layered construct. We remind ourselves of historical realities when we begin to peel away layers and look closely at seemingly innocuous things
like packets of sugar. Creatively this idea encourages us to acknowledge the tensions & discomfort that has been so much a part of the historical trade in sugar. Eddie Chambers

this project was realised thanks to support & advice from:

Eddie Chambers, Simon Cooper, Rupert Daniels, Mac Dunlop, Andrew Kelly, Philippa Goodall, Tessa Jackson, Martin Lister, Nigel Locker, (Venue magazine) & John Summers.

sponsors
sponsored by G.W.R., (sugar)
Good Morning Disposables, (packet printing)
Watershed Media Centre, (postcard)
Easton Community Centre, (postcard)
Venue Magazine, (advert & Festival Brochure)

postcard accompanying sugar packets

She also produced a postcard which mapped the sites where the sugar packetswere available on to the plan of the Festival and so made this dockside geography speak of the overlooked but central issue of oppression within Bristol’s history of imperial and commercial success. Catherine Nash

a harbourside cafe

In 1997 the city hosted the International Festival of the Sea, in which Bristol’s maritime past was celebrated and acted out on the city’s docks, while the fact that the merchants of Bristol had African slaves as their ships most significant cargo was not officially acknowledged other than in a very subtle and powerful artwork/intervention, by the locally-based artist Annie Lovejoy, called Stirring @ the International Festival of the Sea. Although others have described this work as an ‘intervention’, Lovejoy describes it as a  negotiation. The key element of the piece was sugar. This commodity had been the main import in Bristol’s Triangular Trade. It had been bought from the profit of the sale of African slaves, and had been produced by slaves on plantations owned by Bristolian merchants. In Lovejoy’s piece spoon-sized packets of sugar were distributed to caf’s around
the festival site. The packets alluded to the Triangular Trade within the icon of the red triangle; a list of traded goods that included slaves; and an eighteenth century typographic rendering of the word ‘Bristol’.

extract from ‘Paul Gough’s Faux Cenotaph: the contestation of rhetorical public space’ by Sally Morgan, Professor of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

text on ‘stirring’ by Catherine Nash

Modern Historical Geographies
ed. Brian Graham & Catherine Nash. p34
Longman 2000. ISBN 0-582-35779-9

The story of the sea also needs to be thought about through questions of race. By the 1740’s, traders mostly from Bristol & Liverpool, ports which dominated the slave trade, had made Great Britain the world’s leader in carrying human cargoes. At the Festival, in different sites and through different media, artists, writers and activists criticised the way in which problematic histories of oppression in general, through imperialism and colonialism, and in particular slavery were largely elided in the event.

Annie Lovejoy’s artistic intervention entitled ‘stirring@the international festival of the sea’ (Figure 1.3) was a reminder of the human costs of mercantile success in slavery in the infamous triangular trade in which goods, slaves and sugar circulated around the Atlantic between Britain, Africa and the West Indies. From the 1640s, English settlers in the West Indies began to produce sugar and imported slaves to work on their plantations and British manufactured goods.

On Lovejoy’s sugar packets – which were found and used by visitors in the cafes within the festival site – Bristol was located within these circuits of sugar, tobacco, cocoa, tea, spices, rum, slaves and sugar. She also produced a postcard which mapped the sites where the sugar packets were available on to the plan of the Festival and so made this dockside geography speak of the overlooked but central issue of oppression within Bristol’s history of imperial and commercial success.

Japanese edition:

(Modernity no Rekishi Chiri), Tokyo: Kokon Shoin 2005 a Japanese translation of Modern Historical Geographies