Global Plantation Series: Sites of Resistance, Sites of Care - A Conversation with Sancintya Mohini Simpson

This is the third 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 recording, Anna and Shiraz speak with Brisbane-based artist and researcher Sancintya Mohini Simpson, a descendent of indentured labourers sent from India to South Africa to work on colonial sugar plantations, whose practice addresses gaps and silences in the colonial archive and is engaged in wider narratives surrounding the indenture diaspora community. This conversation takes up the plantation as a site of resistance and connection, and the history of migration as a continual one. Sancintya speaks about the poetics of memory and the impossibility of the archive, the latter of which is created both intentionally through strategies of care and respect and as a consequence of lost languages and histories. Refusing Western expectations around the archive, Sancintya and Shiraz draw attention to the complexity of memorialising the stories and images of indentured labourers and presenting histories of trauma to an audience.