Day 4, July 3 - The London Museum of the Docklands.
This museum was suggested to my by one of my professors for my research. There is no art in it that I will concentrate on, I picked it because I wanted to visit a testimonial museum and what better place to do it than at the Docklands - the place that fueled the British Empire? I was interested in seeing exactly how the history of this place is dealt with and how it is shown to today. Historically this place has caused both fast economic growth and great suffering to many people who were part of the triangle trade. Is there deconstruction of the slavery? Is it sustained throughout the whole museum? How is the history represented?
Yet again I spent almost all day in a museum, there is a lot to see here. The three floors contain 10 exhibition halls that are bursting at seams with information, pictures, charts, displays and many many other things to look at and experience. I will not go through all of it, there is no point. I will only examine the essence of everything that I saw and fill in the gaps with my own observations and opinions.
The museum visit starts on the third floor and goes down to lower floors from there. Can you guess what is the contents of the first exhibition hall? You probably have an idea given that I already previously said the smell of Empire still lingers around in the air of London. There was a very brief introduction to the history of the West Indies Docks (built in 1802 in Canary Wharf) - the workers, the cargo, how it worked, the buildings, etc. I spent a lot of time in this gallery and soon enough I started to notice a dominant thread. This thread being that the entire gallery was filled with barrels, trolleys, scales, baskets, videos of diligent workers, informational posters of how much profit was made in West Indies Docks, destination signs, security, etc.
It was the classic model of "look what I used to make all this money that built the Empire"type of gallery. There were close to no mention of how this wealth came to be, a mindset very prominent in the times of Empire that allowed to disassociate from the exploitation of another human being. I counted the times some poster or material gave away that it might not all be thanks to the hard work of white Europeans. The list was short - 2 images showing workers that are women or of different ethnicity (in its 180 years of existence I doubt there were only a handful of non-white workers); a sign that said the docks were built by traders from the West Indies slave plantations; one display about excessive use of natural resources and over-hunting the Greenland whales; a poster about the diversity of people that populates the riverside communities; and finally the poster about Prince Lee Boo as one among many exploited people and smallpox that was deadly to many immigrants from other parts of the world.
Except for the next gallery I will examine, the lower floors had a little more variety of content presenting the poverty that resulted from the fast growing industry, forced relocations, fires, unsanitary conditions, and constant river pollution. However, the emphasis was still of the displays of prosperity and the celebration of building new industries, infrastructure, etc. While all of that is good and well, most places would display their achievements, a certain question did not leave me. Who were the workers? Who built the new infrastructure? Who were the dockers? There is a strong aversion to mentioning or examining the actual workers who produced the metropolitan improvements or the goods that were so carefully weighted and sold at the docks. In fact, in their attempt to be politically correct (or not) the curators have done and great job of not placing any derogatory material in the displays. This was done so much so that the effect was this - the work and exploitation of others and slavery was completely eliminated. These "othered" people were erased from the history of this museum with only one exception. The wealth and development seemed to come from out of thin air and the use of slaves for entertainment and work did not exist.
The exception I mentioned above is the one truly interesting gallery that juxtaposes the entire collection of the museum. This gallery was called London, Sugar & Slavery. From the information that I got in the gallery, I understood that this section was curated by someone outside of the museum and the location was picked based on the history of the docklands. This exhibition was the only real critique of the wealth made thanks to slavery and its social impacts afterwards. The exhibition starts with a almost floor to ceiling list stating names and captains of ships, owners, destinations, and the number of slaves they carried. This list was placed right next to a painting that celebrating the vessels that produced wealth for Britain.
Many of the displays contained information that compared costs of a slave to the profit gained in time period of slavery. There was even an outright critique stating that there are still negative consequences to slavery today and that in the rush to accumulate wealth, entire societies and tribal communities were disrupted, people displaced, transported, exploited, tortured, and killed. This exhibition also revisited the history of the West Indies Docklands, only this time explaining their role in slave and sugar trade. There were everything - abolition, ledgers that counted slaves as property, the trade triangle explained, contemporary consequences and even displays showing how slave trade was justified by using derogatory language and gross misrepresentations of Africans.
One of my favorite displays were the one of contemporary porcelain that had both provocative images and text on it to really push together the two sides of cognitive dissonance so many people suffer from. It placed the enslaved person right on top of the dish that contained their labor's product. You cannot enjoy it without looking at the suffering the product has caused.
Another interesting element was the slave shackle that was attached to the wall and invited people to touch it, to play with it. For some reason I imagine that kids are playing it with the most, a strange thought putting together in my mind what we consider the ugly and violent past with the object of innocence and naivety.
These two exhibitions were in such stark opposition to each other. I am glad that the London, Sugar & Slavery exhibition has been so popular and probably has found a permanent home in that building (it was opened in 2007) but there is still much more to do to change the still existing model of displaying the wealth and only the "good" parts of the history. Without the juxtaposition of the Slavery exhibition, a child would never learn in that museum the ugly truths behind how London became the wealth city it is.
