Middle Passage Installation

Abstract

The Middle Passage, the infamous transatlantic voyage transporting enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the coast of North America, has come to epitomize the horrors of transatlantic and plantation slavery and therefore usually forms the centrepiece of any slavery exhibition. When designing this centrepiece curators could hardly ignore the long European tradition of iconic visualizations of the Middle Passage that focus around the image of the ship (cf. Wood 2000: 14). Various exhibitions have faced the challenge of finding an adequate way to represent the Middle Passage by opting for walk-through reconstructions of the hold of a slave ship. The Transatlantic Slavery Gallery (TSG) in Liverpool (1994) had originally also decided on such a recreation, dominated by a soundtrack of atmospheric noises (for example, waves against the ship’s hull) and the alternating readings from the log entries of captain John Newton on voyages made between 1752 and 1754, and the memoirs of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), who endured the Middle Passage as a child. Anthony Tibbles, one of the curators of the exhibition, detailed the debates and considerations that went into this design, freely admitting that they were not satisfied by the compromise which was eventually reached:

Some wanted us to construct an emotive but authentic hold to walk through with manacled bodies covered in excrement, groans, smells — the full works. […], but we did not want something that frightened people (particularly children) and we did not want to sensationalise. […] We wanted visitors to use their imaginations and hoped to provide them with enough information and experience to do so. […] Some people do find it a moving and emotional experience; for others the bareness of the interpretation leaves them unmoved. I suspect that visitors’ responses depend on what they bring with them.(Tibbles 1996)