Reflecting on BOTANY BAY - guest blog by Carolyn Defrin

 

BOTANY BAY celebration - Manchester

BOTANY BAY was a major Participation and Learning project, which we ran as part of ORIGINS 2021-22 with the support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund.  Here our External Evaluator, Dr. Carolyn Defrin, reflects on the project's journey and impact.

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The timeline of BOTANY BAY, from its launch in the peak of Omicron to its completion in what now feels like a post-pandemic landscape, speaks to its imperative value. In the last three years the entire globe has been visibly impacted by a health crisis. But Covid’s necessary slowing down of society has created space and time to more clearly witness and experience the long interconnected crises between people and the planet. The entanglement of Covid, the Climate Crisis and Colonialism is deep and complex and a project like BOTANY BAY enters the conversation by creating numerous pathways into understanding our inter-relationships with people and land, illuminating how we might start tending to both with more care, awareness and deliberate action.

With attention on Indigenous practices and principles, BOTANY BAY aimed to address the critical need to look after our world differently. Indigenous inspired growing and gardening practices have a lot to teach us about how interconnected we are and how much care is needed to keep those interconnections alive and thriving. By shining a light on the values and cultural traditions of a range of Indigenous communities across the map, BOTANY BAY platformed looking back as a means to look forward. Drawing out more complete histories of plant origins and the ways in which politics have complicated those stories invited understanding and acknowledgement as a means to grasp at large concepts of Colonialism and Climate Change through a series of experiential activities.

Through museum visits, treasure hunts in heritage gardens, special visits from heritage experts and performances from artists with direct links to Indigenous backgrounds, BOTANY BAY offered a wide set of access points for children to encounter new knowledge. Children became more inquisitive about the environmental repercussions of deforestation in the Amazon as they watched intricate puppet animals created and performed by José Navarro lose critical access to their food and homes. As students acted out a game with the Manchester Museum, where they had to follow butterflies to find specific medicinal plants and flowers, they embodied not only the inter-relationships between humans and animals, and the mutual care needed to sustain such ecologies, but also learned of the detrimental impact of certain types of farming, land ownership and extraction on those relationships as the game began to introduce obstacles for the students to find the butterflies.

BOTANY BAY is not encapsulated through a box ticking exercise of finite learnings and rote memorisations. Rather it is a programme of multi-sensory, embodied learning activities that built skills in attention, care and individual thinking and adaptation. As Manchester Museum's Curator of Indigenous Perspectives Alexandra P Alberda, an institution can be a conversation starter, and BOTANY BAY feels very much about starting conversations, activating ideas, getting one’s hands literally and metaphorically dirty with some messy problems in our current world.

As students created their own gardens- planting, tending, growing and cooking their own food inspired by Indigenous practices and principles- they witnessed acts of visible growth and change. They paid attention to what fruits, flowers and vegetables need to survive, learning how to adjust the plan when survival wasn’t at its optimum. In the final months of the project they considered how to invite others in to appreciate and enjoy their harvest and their learnings.

These essential observations and actions manifest the literal attention and awareness needed in our current climate emergency and the metaphoric care and iteration needed across our inter-personal relationships where social inequities continue to divide us.

Inquiry begets further inquiry. Several questions arose from the partnering schools, museums and heritage experts as BOTANY BAY drew to a close. How do we learn from Indigenous principles? How do we adapt them to a UK context? How do we embed the learning more deeply and continue to grasp large and sprawling concepts like Colonialism and Climate Change that need our attention urgently?

These big ideas underpinning BOTANY BAY are not only conceptual (and in need of translation depending on the audience), they are also in an early phase of becoming more mainstream. Between the pandemic, the building attention around socio-economic disparity deriving from far-reaching impacts of colonialism, and the climate crisis becoming ever more visible, institutions and communities are growing an awareness around the need for systemic change. But this is slow, long-term work. BOTANY BAY and its numerous impacts on several stakeholders, including Border Crossings, offers a huge opportunity to develop and build the kinds of relationships that can contribute significantly to such systemic change.

There are many immediate and long-term positive impacts that have emanated from BOTANY BAY. The practical skills built in gardening, growing, cooking and ceremony making, the strengthening of critical soft skills like confidence, team work, communication, planning and adapting are valuable outcomes– especially coming out of numerous pandemic lockdowns that hampered such skill development. Theses skills will have life-long residual impacts for young people resonant with the Indigenous principle to create sustainability by thinking 7 generations in the future.

Carolyn Defrin

Pocahontas and After

Two images, each showing two young women dressed to show their culture, their pride, their sense of self.  The first image dates from 1907, and shows The Misses Simeon, from the Stoney-Nakoda people of Western Canada, photographed by Byron Harmon.  The second was taken a couple of months ago by John Cobb in Marlborough School, West London, and shows a pupil of Iraqi heritage called Rose Al Saria, pictured with her sister.  It was Rose who chose the particular archive image as the basis for her self-portrait, and who conceptualised the way it would be configured and posed.

This pair of photos is just one example in Border Crossings' exhibition Pocahontas and After, currently on show at Syon House in Brentford, until at least June 2nd.  The exhibition - which people have been saying is as thought-provoking as it is visually stunning - represents the culmination of a sustained period of education and community work, beginning with the ORIGINS Festival last summer.  During the Festival, we not only held a ceremony for three indigenous women to commemorate Pocahontas at Syon, where she had stayed in the summer of 1616: we also brought indigenous artists into direct contact with the diverse communities around the House, in the two Primary Schools where they led workshops and study sessions, in the wonderful CARAS refugee group, and through our network of committed and energetic festival volunteers.  In the following months, a distilled group from each of these partners has been working closely with heritage experts from the archives, Native American cultural consultants, and our own artistic staff to explore the ways in which Native American people have been presented in the past.

Their journeys into the archives have been rich and challenging.  What we think of as "realistic" photographs of indigenous people often turn out to be nothing of the kind.  Edward Curtis, for example, apparently carried a chest of "authentic" costumes and props with him, which he used in his photographs to recreate the life of "the vanishing race" as he imagined it may have been in some pre-contact Romantic idyll.  In other words, the archive photos are often about the photographer and the viewer, far more than they are about the subject.

As our volunteers came to realise this, they became more and more assertive of the need for agency in contemporary portraiture.  Complex and fascinating decisions started to be made, placing the generation of meaning in the bodies of the people photographed.  One subject, Inés Achabal, showed her tattooed back, with its macaws symbolising her home city of Caracas, in response to Curtis's "bon savage archetype" in his 1909 image of an Arikara girl.  For an indigenous Samoan living in London, Sani Muliaumaseali'i, a 1914 image of a mask dancer from the Pacific North-West provided links to his own complex and multi-layered persona.

What I love about this exhibition is that the meaning generated does not reside in one image or the other within the pair - but is rather in the energising of the space between, the dialogue between past and present, between different cultures, between human beings portrayed in different ways.  It seems to me to be at once of way of honouring the indigenous subjects portrayed in the archive photographs, and of reinventing the form that was often too reductive in its attempts to categorise them.

Thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund for supporting this project.  Photos from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

Dare to be Different

It's been an amazing few weeks here, with our Participation and Learning programmes going into overdrive as the educational year heads towards its close.  Joel and Gabrielle have been working very closely with the London Māori community to complete the Oral Histories component of our Heritage Project - and the website has now been launched!  Click here.  Once you're on the site, you need to register if you want to access the fascinating archive of interviews, which are there in both written and audio form, dealing with migration, Polynesian life in London, ceremony, lifestyle and change.  There's also a great video about the project, which shows people from the community discussing why this work matters to them, and young people from Malorees School who have been working with the London Māori.  And, the process, they all got their arts awards!

Meanwhile, down in Plymouth, I've been working with a group of young refugees and asylum seekers, known as Dare to be Different, who came to the city as a dispersal centre, and who come from places as diverse as Afghanistan, Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq, Angola, Russia, Congo, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Zimbabwe - and probably a few more besides.  Two months of workshops have explored their creativity, and have drawn off their experiences, their hopes and their dreams.  It's been a fascinating and inspiring journey - and it's culminated in a performance called Division which they've presented at the Drum Theatre.

What's very salutary about this group is the complex and fluid nature of the identities they are exploring.  In some ways, they are defined by their past and by their refugee status: they have fled from persecution, and many of them have lived through far more in their early years than most people do in a lifetime.  We had one very powerful session based around the participants sharing personal stories about how their lives had changed - and many of them were astounded by what others had lived through.  And so was I.  On the other hand, they feel an intense need to move beyond that restricted identity, and to create a new way of living in the new space they have come to.  They are young people, with much to give and much to expect; so they cannot and must not be defined solely by a past over which they had no control.  Division was a terrific piece of theatre, because it was able to include a sense of what had been left behind, or perhaps absorbed - but also a sense of the lightness, the comedy present in young lives, and the aspirations and challenges of living in a new space.  

What's more, they were wonderfully eloquent about all this when we had a post-show discussion, and that discussion involved not only theatre people and friends, but also public figures like the police, the racial equality council and other public agencies.  In fact, this work became a study in how theatre can become an attribute of participatory democracy.  Something we are sorely lacking in our society right now. 

Meeting the Maori

The last Origins had some very interesting links with London's Maori community - including the powhiri pictured here - and this year we're really developing these in a big way - thanks to our collaborations with the City of London Festival and Heritage Lottery Fund. Over the weekend, Gabrielle and I went to New Zealand House to meet the Maori youth group, Te Kohanga Reo, and today I was back to chat with Ngati Ranana. As well as holding another powhiri - this time on Hampstead Heath and with real hangi food - they will also be involved in plans to bring a Maori war canoe, or waka, up the Thames.

Even more exciting is the Participation and Learning project, which Gabrielle is heading up with Carissa. This will link the younger London Maori to elders, as well as giving kids in lots of London schools the chance to learn a lot more about Maori culture, learn haka, waiata and poi (various forms of music and dance, since you ask!), and to build their own model wakas. The intergenerational oral histories are going to lead to a new website and an archive of Maori presence in the UK, which actually goes back to 1800, no less.

Wise Thoughts

A very interesting meeting with Niranjan Kamatkar, who runs Wise Thoughts. We've known each other for a while - they used to be our neighbours in Chocolate Factory 2, and now they have an office above Wood Green Library. Wise Thoughts is an organisation for minority ethnic and minority sexuality people - and so particularly interesting to us as we prepare the Trilogy. Gabrielle from Polygon Arts (who is about to take some desk space in our office - making Wood Green more crowded than ever!) and I have been looking at creating outreach work around this, and we've had a chat with the Heritage Lottery Fund, who seem keen. Wise Thoughts are obvious partners, particularly since they run GFest every November - which could be a great platform for any work produced by people participating in the outreach project.

Niranjan is an incredibly committed activist. He tells me his priority for 2010 is called "LGBT Arts for All" - which translates as getting sexual minority work out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. Since all of our work is about opening up dialogues between the different groups in society, we can easily buy in to this.

I was wrong about China, by the way. The Mr Gay China event was closed down by the police. On a technicality.