Global Plantation Series: Inheritance - Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s Plantation Histories

This is the second of a series of artist-directed digital discussions developed by Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Shiraz Bayjoo in collaboration with International Curators Forum that contemplate the global forms and meanings of the plantation historically, and in our contemporary moment.

In this conversation Anna and Shiraz speak with artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby about her research and practice as it relates to an ongoing engagement with the history of the enslavement of South Sea Islanders on Australian sugarcane plantations in the 19th century, and the contemporary legacy and impact of the Pacific’s slave trade. The conversation addresses the generational reality of the plantation as home, the capacity of the archive to render plantation histories both visible and invisible, and the ways in which both Jasmine and Shiraz excavate family and public archives as a means of formulating new visual languages through which to make public these narratives.