HERRING, IRON, GUNPOWDER, HUMANS & SUGAR (HIGHS)

Herring, Iron, Gunpowder, Humans & Sugar (Swedish title: Sill, Järn, Krut, Människor & Socker) is a cultural project that examines how the triangle trading system (16th to early19th centuries), the economic system underpinning the transatlantic slave trade, still affects contemporary economic and cultural structures. The project is a collaboration between the Jamaican dancer Olando Whyte and the Swedish visual artist Rut Karin Zettergren and consists of four parts. Collection of facts, creation of sculptural objects, performances with dance and the construction of an telephone app telling the story about the the history of the triangular trade and the transatlantic slave trade from a intercultural perspective. We want to investigate questions about legacy, re visit and rewrite history and use artistic methods to discuss and process a historical trauma in.

Within the project Whyte and Zettergren will visit places that are connected to the triangular trade in Sweden, England, Ghana and Jamaica and collect information about the history of each place. We will collect and make sculptural objects from the material that the places used to produce and export. With the sculptural objects we will do performances in historical places. In Sweden we will collect iron and visit iron mines that produced the bar iron that was used as a currency to bye slaves with, used in the

slave chains, plantation tools and weapons. Collect salted herring and visit harbours where the salted fish were shipped off to the Caribbean where it was used as food for slaves. From England we will collect material like cotton material, glas and gunpowder and visit old factories that refined the colonial goods and banks and cultural institutions built from the wealth. In Ghana we vill visit former slave castles along the coast line and gather material that used to be traded as gold and spices. In Jamaica the project will visit former plantations, suger mills, rom distilleries and and slave markets. As the sculptural material we will use molasses, sugar, hard wood , indigo and tobacco that used to be grown on the plantations.

The performances will be based on the history of each place and consist off story telling, dance with the object and possibly form a forum for healing. We believe that it is important to try to re tell history from new angles and bring together knowledge and facts from at different geographical places that are intertwined but has been forgotten. To develop the performance we will look at dances as traditional Afro-Jamaican dances that used to function as release for trauma caused by slavery. We will also look at western forms of cultural therapy as art and dance therapy an psychodrama. The performances will be made at