Dubship I – Black Starliner – An African Robots and SPACECRAFT Project

ABOUT

Dubship I – Black Starliner (2019 – ongoing) is a large-scale audio-mechanical spaceship sculpture that memorialises the first ship in the Black Star Line shipping company, launched by the political activist Marcus Garvey in 1919 with the aim of repatriating the descendants of African slaves back to Africa. Garvey is regarded as a prophet by Rastafarians, and the Black Star Line is immortalised in dub and reggae culture. Dub’s sound effects and use of powerful sound systems transport the listener, and have influenced science fiction and fantasies of space travel as an echo of this desire for transcendence. Read the full label text from its first exhibition.

The sculpture was produced using African street wire-art techniques, combined with cutting-edge VR sculpting tools to produce a real life ‘wire frame’ in metal rod and galvanised steel wire. It contains a cargo of plastic jerry cans and wooden marimba notes that are struck to produce sounds, amplified through a sound system and FX units and broadcast out of a star-shaped speaker cabinet. The track is sequenced by a rotating oil-drum perforated with a pattern of holes through which light shines to activate an array of strikers, making a version of Fred Locks’ classic dub track Black Star Liner. The video above shows some of the process of making the sculpture.

Dubship I – Black Starliner was exhibited at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town from April – August 2019, on the show Still Here Tomorrow… The sculpture’s design responded to the museum’s iconic atrium space designed by Thomas Heatherwick, carved out of century-old grain silos in the shape of a maize kernel. The sculpture was produced with funding from the National Arts Council of South Africa. It is an African Robots and SPACECRAFT project by Ralph Borland.

SITE

The sculpture was first installed in the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, suspended in the atrium carved from the silos of the 100-year old grain factory the museum is built on. The carved-out atrium was a science-fiction setting for the materialisation of this space-ship sculpture, and the museum’s proximity to Cape Town’s docks connects with the history of the Black Star Line shipping company. The sculpture has since appeared as an installation in its dismantled form in the exhibition Exploded View on Albert Road in Woodstock, close to where Woodstock Beach once lay on Cape Town’s coastline prior to the land reclamation projects, and apartheid forced-removals, of the 1950s. We intend to tour the sculpture to West Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the US, touching on the intended routes of Garvey’s line, during the centenary period of the Black Star Line from 2019 – 2022. The sculpture slipped the constraints of geography in 2020 in its digital form in Digi-Dub Club.

STORY

There are three main narrative threads to the project: the history of the Black Star Line shipping company; dub music; and technology. The process of making the sculpture is a story in itself, combining hand craft with emerging digital processes, something you can follow in the making-of video for the project. The story of the Black Star Line is one of an ambitious attempt beset by set-backs, including infiltration of Garvey’s organisation by the early FBI using their first black field-agents. It was an attempt at pushing back at historical wrongs that has resonated onwards through history, despite its limited achievements as a practical project – an example perhaps of ‘heroic failure’. The story of dub music is of the repurposing of a new technology, developed in Western sound laboratories, and adapted to the purposes of African diasporic musical culture in Jamaica. Dub music’s weaving together of elements is an influence on the development of much electronic music today. Technological development is a story in the sculpture, with its rotating, perforated oil-drum music sequencer based on a design for a programmable musical device by the Islamic inventor Al Jazari almost 1,000 years ago. Garvey took the ship, as the leading transportation technology of his time, and reversed its meaning from a tool of colonial extraction, to a means of African empowerment and return. The project reimagines his ship from a 100 years ago, 100 years into the future, and invites reflection on where we are now in terms of Garvey’s legacy and the injustices he confronted.

DIGI-DUB CLUB

An online Virtual Reality artwork and shared social space for remote interaction with an animated, sonified 3D scan of Dubship I – Black Starliner, and with other people. Digi-Dub Club is a world on the VRChat platform, launched in November 2020, in which a fire burns perpetually in a night-time desert landscape, next to a shipping-container bar. Ruins of large-scale sculptures jut from the surrounding sands. It is a set waiting to be inhabited, an artworld in development, and a continually evolving experiment; one of over 25,000 user-created worlds for remote social interaction in VRChat. The development of the world was supported by a grant from the African Culture Fund. See more about the project at studio.ralphborland.net/digi-dub-club, or go direct to the Digi-Dub Club VRChat world.

SPACECRAFT

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