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.