When it takes an outsider to teach you about your own city, you know there’s a gap in education. Siska’s film, highlighting the streets of Liverpool named after slave traders is an education for all of us, and an opportunity to think harder about the sorts of professions we relate to the trade of human beings.
Hope Street features heavily in the film, and while William Hope or his father Samuel Hope were not directly listed as slave traders (Samuel was a cotton trader and architect, listed historically in family records as a bricklayer) their ties to the trade are clear. But the vast majority of us see Hope Street as a positive place, linking two of Liverpool’s most iconic buildings together at either end.
It is a positive place, packed with culture, but its also a reminder that the place we live, and build our lives is founded in no small part on the backs of an inhuman trade.
It is one of the defining histories of Liverpool, and as a port city its particularly important to talk about when we speak about our history.
Port cities all over the world, including Arab ports, were part of that same trade. Those historic links, as well as present-day identities are central to this exhibition linking Arab artists to Liverpool through shared experiences of port cities.
Wars bring dereliction to ports around the world, but ports also bring industry. Industry, particularly port industry brings both prosperity and social imbalance. That brings long-established societal rifts, but it also breeds potent cultural identities.
Ports all over the world share an energy in that way. Some of it comes simply from having iconic skylines and waterfronts that are, in themselves, attractions. But here, in Port Cities, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival highlights those connections. Positive, negative, and simple fraternal ties between places that are continents apart.
It’s not all about the slave trade either. Colonialism and a British desire to master the earth and lead it as a collector of cultural and biological curiosities mean that we also have a world-renowned collection of objects and plants shared between palm houses and museums that were brought in the Britain via Mersey ports and have lived here ever since.
Today, those collections are key to understanding global histories, and we’re beyond privileged to have them, but to have them without understanding why we have them is wrong. Lalia Hida’s Reversed Landscape uses sculpture to create memorable objects that speak of displaced colonial commodities.
I’m fascinated by how this exhibition can criticise and emphasise the value of Liverpool’s history and collections at the same time. It’s a really useful approach.
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Port Cities was open at Space Liverpool until 20th July as part of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival. Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith