Mapping Space, Debating Place: Jelly Mould Pavilions (2010) and Official Sites and Sights of Slavery and Memory

Abstract

Lubaina Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilions is an installation which draws attention to Liverpool’s troubled history as the largest eighteenth century slavery port in the world. After a discussion of Himid’s earlier memorial designs for the slave ship Zong as a way of discussing her ideas about memorialisation, the chapter moves to a discussion of the work using theoretical works about history, memory and trauma including the work of Paul Gilroy, Ian Baucom, bell hooks, Jean Fisher, Giorgio Agamben, Dionne Brand, Paul Ricoeur, Susan Stewart and Michael Rothberg. In particular it uses Agamben’s idea of “witnessing in the wake of historical silence” as a mode of understanding Himid’s memorial purpose. It describes the postcolonial melancholia that affects Britain and Liverpool in its reaction to its imperial past and describe Himid’s work as a memorializing attempt to show African peoples and their history as central to local and national narratives of explication, to make them visible. The chapter discusses the mobility of the project existing in multiple venues through the city constructing an alternate promenade through the cityscape making for a counter-public intervention. The Jelly Moulds articulate Liverpool’s entanglement in “spectacular conspicuous consumption” through its trade in slave-produced goods such as sugar and uses architectural models to make the point that there is an alternative future.