Liverpool Biennial 2021 / Art Installation By Lamin Fofana

Lamin Fofana presents an audio-visual installation at The Lewis’s Building. His large-scale multisensory sound installation takes inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! Du Bois’s Darkwater presents an alternate mapping of the interconnected global system of racial capitalism, while Philip’s staggering book-length poem recounts the legal proceedings which took place after the Zong massacre in 1781 – when the captain of the eponymous slave ship ordered 150 enslaved Africans to be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance money. The ship was owned by Liverpool merchants, whose crew acted to protect their interests. Through an immersive installation, Fofana uncovers this overlooked history, the horrors of the middle passage and the realities of racial capitalism.