Blog Post: Marianne Keating

Landlessness, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018, is a dual screen video work filmed on location in Ireland and Jamaica in 2017. It is the first in a series of moving image pieces that examines the largely undocumented and unaddressed migration of the Irish diaspora to Jamaica and the resulting consequences on contemporary Jamaica.

In the years that followed abolition of slavery in 1834 the Jamaican sugar cane industry was no longer reaching its previous lucrative heights resulting in the Jamaican planters struggling to maintain their position in the global economic market. With their labour force reduced and no longer willing to work under the proposed conditions, crops began to fail due to lack of manpower needed to bring the crops to fruition, and growing bankruptcy ensued amongst the Jamaican plantocracy.

Looking for an alternative, the planters introducing a system called ‘Indentured Labour’ to supply a new labour force to the island. The economic hardships of Irish Catholic people under British Colonial Rule offered a fertile ground for recruitment. Many Irish committed to Indenture, a system where the migrant worker was bound by a signed contract to work for a fixed period of time in return for passage, housing and provisions (in this case for three years starting with child labour from the age of seven).

My work Landlessness addresses this wave of migration of Irish to Jamaica during the period 1835-1842 and traces the path taken by a group of indentured labourers from their recruitment in Ireland to their final destination on the plantation of Freeman’s Hall Estate, Trelawney on the North Coast of Jamaica.

The script featured in the work is based on records found in the National Archives in Ireland, England and Jamaica in the form of expanded conversations and documents this migration through the recovered textual traces, which previously had been consigned to disappear within the archives. This, in turn, allows us to question that which has been remembered and that which has been forgotten, the nature of how this information has been recorded and for whom - in an attempt to determine new historical narratives and return a voice, which once was rendered mute.

Marianne Keating: BNC18 Artist Page