CONTACT ZONE, 2012

On 8 July 2012, 53 people from 15 different countries were brought together on a beach in the North East of England to lend their bodies to a silent re-enactment. Drawing inspiration from an 18th century print depicting a slave-ship named ‘Brookes’, ‘Contact Zone’ questions what it means to live in a society; where identity, cultures and customs need to be negotiated daily.

Contact Zone is a term coined by linguist Mary Louise Pratt to refer to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”. Mary Louise Pratt, 1991, ‘The Arts of Contact Zone’.

 This project re-interprets the slave-ship ‘Brookes’ as one of these ‘social spaces’ and appropriates it as a symbol in order to explore the cross-cultural legacies of the Middle Passage in our contemporary times. Currently in Europe the support for extreme right political parties is rising; racial attacks are on the increase, and immigration is seen as negative. By focusing on the cross-cultural exchanges triggered by the past this work provides a platform for reflection on how these have shaped and continue to shape our society.

Contact Zone embraces the contradiction between the theoretical framework of postcolonialism and the structures governing our society today. Although this theoretical framework claims to highlight and empower the previously unheard or ignored voices of ‘the other’, these voices are still heavily controlled and consigned to hermetic (mediated and vetted) enclosures. This is equality as it is ‘negotiated’, translated, packed and distributed to us by hierarchical powers.