[…] WE DEH HERE consists of digital stills of, among other things, gravestones in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard Cemetery and a plaque at Tain Royal Academy in the Scottish Highlands. These sites, whose function and value aren’t immediately clear, are juxtaposed with scans of nineteenth-century maps, produced in pen, ink and watercolour to plot settlements and slave plantations along British Guiana’s Berbice and Demerara rivers. Gnomic fragments of text, suggestive of some cut-up epitaph, are repeatedly superimposed.
Transferring her assembly of images to analogue film, Peters has made an object – one that speaks to notions of permanence, ephemera and reproduction in archival practices while itself functioning as a kind of memorialisation.
The power of WE DEH HERE’s associative logic is cumulative. It isn’t just that Maybelle Peters invokes connections between sites by virtue of their sequential placement; it’s also that the images themselves recur – as if a second or third look will yield new knowledge about these locales and their interrelation. The work’s narrative opacity speaks to the artist’s sleuth-like speculations, necessitated by her own navigation of institutional archives and their strategic deployment of fragmentation, obfuscation and erasure in documenting Scotland’s role in the enslavement of African people.
Transferring her assembly of images to analogue film, Peters has made an object – one that speaks to notions of permanence, ephemera and reproduction in archival practices while itself functioning as a kind of memorialisation. Projected like so, the cold digitality of the artist’s photographs is made to glow and shimmer. The images acquire a life, an appreciable movement: a demonstration, perhaps, that the histories referenced here only appear to be static. The undead residues of colonialism persist in and across discrete data: in the gravestones of plantation owners, for instance, or at the locations of buildings they built.
Michael Pattison for Alchemy Film & Arts
