Published in Bristol Evenin Post, 13 September 2007
By Steve Wright
The highlight of Arnolfini’s 2007 season, and the most high-profile exhibition in the region since the spectacular British Art Show more than a year ago, Port City is an international, cross-artform project with a profound local resonance. Central to it is the concept of the eponymous port city, a symbolic site of cultural exchange.
Traditionally, the port represents the gateway from a country to the rest of the world, the point of contact with other cultures and the place where not just goods but people and ideas are moved and exchanged.
But the march of globalisation has had a dramatic effect on that, and today port cities have looser territorial ties and are seen as trading posts on an international network. The same global economics have also given rise to populations of migrant workers, who travel the world with port cities as highly sensitive points of entry.
Port City takes these issues, and themes of global migration, trade and contemporary slavery, as the starting point for a programme that features the work of more than 40 artists and comprises installation, live art, film, literature, music, events, workshops and more.
Meschac Gaba’s vast model of a cityscape is made from sugar, drawing attention to its historical importance as a commodity and its links to the slave trade.
This “global village” includes several well-known Bristol landmarks remade in sugar, including an instantly familiar Clifton Suspension Bridge and Cabot Tower.
Emerging British artist Melanie Jackson, who had a solo exhibition at Arnolfini at the turn of the year, returns with her new project The Undesirables. At the centre is a panorama of etchings and drawings made from media reports about the MSC Napoli, the container ship that ran into trouble in the English Channel in January this year, posing a serious environmental risk, before being beached at Branscombe in Devon. They’re combined with the animated stories of dock workers interviewed by the artist in Avonmouth and other container ports.
Coinciding with Abolition 200, Bristol’s commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade, Port City includes several new works made in specific response to our local context, exploring both the city’s history and its contemporary nature.
Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves researched the Floating Harbour for her work Seeds of Change, identifying areas where ballast was brought ashore and taking samples of seeds left there and preserved by mud.
These ballast seeds have been germinated and tendered by a diverse range of individuals and groups including the Malcolm X Elders Forum, St Paul’s-based youth and family project Full Circle and the British Conservation Trust Volunteers. The result is a garden that poignantly reflects the different routes travelled by Bristol merchants.
Other highlights of the exhibition include Mary Evans’ kaleidoscopes showing contemporary scenes from the triangle of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a video presented in a giant pillbox by Erik van Lieshout and, after the success of February’s event, another Live Art Weekender on Friday to Sunday, September 28-30.
Participants include La Pocha Nostra, hosting a politically conscious fashion show, Duncan Speakman, presenting a huge “audio map” of his four-day walk through the working fields of Somerset, and Roza Ilgen, creating strange images from human hair gathered from the barbers of Bristol. There is also a programme of screenings, exhibition tours and events, including a behind-the-scenes look at unique, socially-run cinema the Cube Microplex.
From November this Arnolfini commission travels to two other port cities, exhibiting at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, until January 2008, and at Liverpool Biennial in September 2008.