Instagram: corinne.silva.rocks

I'm finally Instagramming some of my Rocks & Fortresses adventures: tracking invisible empires along the Mediterranean. #rocks #fortresses and things that happen along the way. 

Posted @withregram • @other_objects This is Sam King (1926 - 2016). A decade ago, Sam was kind enough to grant me an interview at his home in Brixton. Sam was the first black mayor of any London borough. He fought in the RAF during WWII. He took citizenship seriously. He was also one of the passengers on the Windrush when it arrived at Tilbury in 1948. When I interviewed Sam, I was researching the cultural memory of the Windrush for a PhD. I knew the passenger log inside out, and I knew that there were far more migrants onboard than the 492 usually named. If anything, the Windrush was far more significant than was generally known. But archives weren’t enough; without talking to people who had been there, I knew the history was missing something essential. Although Sam had been asked to tell his story many times — I’d occasionally see him giving an interview when I lived in Brixton — he was very generous. He enriched with a vital personal narrative what would have otherwise been an amendment to a few facts and figures. The stakes of that story, for me as a white academic and Sam as someone who made that moment, would always be starkly different. But I at least had faith in the permanence of the Windrush as a monumental and celebratory symbol. I had deeply underestimated the racism of the modern Conservative party. When the news broke about the Windrush generation deportations, I was sickened in a way I still cannot articulate. The deportations, the denial of access to public services, were acts of vandalism to that generation and to people’s lives. I’m writing this now, provisional thoughts though there are, to say this: however terrible you believe the politics of the right to be, no matter what knowledge you arm yourself with, to be black in Britain is to risk discovering that they are far, far worse than you imagined. I don’t know how Sam would have responded to the recent demonstrations. But personally, public health aside, seeing protesters on the streets and Colston rolled into the river are some of the few hopeful political acts I’ve witnessed in recent times. Portrait by Corinne Silva (From War to Windrush, 2007, IWM collections).

Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – Aerial View. Agnes Denes, 1982.⁣ ⁣ “My decision to plant a wheat field in Manhattan instead of designing just another public sculpture, grew out of the longstanding concern and need to call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values,” Denes wrote. “Placing it at the foot of the World Trade Center, a block from Wall Street, facing the Statue of Liberty, also had symbolic import.... It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.”⁣ ⁣ #conceptualart #contemporaryart #landart #climatejustice

⁣ Wheatfield – A Confrontation by Agnes Denes, Manhattan, 1982.