The Cast Away Project

Ghana Sat 30-06-2007

The Cast Away Project
By Caryl Phillips

This exhibition has transformed a gallery into an environment concerned with the washed-in and washed-out history and memory of displacements, gold and slavery along the one-time African Gold Coast, resonating with the current anniversaries of Ghanaian independence and the abolition of slavery.

The exhibition has also been planned and scheduled so as to address the creative and intellectual possibilities of 'Beyond Text?'.

Since 2003 I have produced at my studio in Accra, Ghana , about 1,500 Castaways. Each piece is a collage composition created from washed-up materials I collected along four local shorelines: Pram Pram, Jamestown, Labadi, and Anomabo.

Virginia Ryan

^{Viginia Ryan with her cast away installation}

All the works are white-washed and flicked through with grey-gold, resonant with the colors of foam and sand as the waves break on the very shores from where the inhabitants were once taken and enslaved to build the new world.

Castaways are exhibited as a collective artwork of two hundred or more pieces, entire walls or rooms with the pieces hung close together in rows, as if in a continuous wave, remembering and recording the simple stuff of people’s contemporary needs and desires along the one-time Gold Coast of West Africa.

This exhibit format emphasizes the power of repetition and number, creating an environment concerned with the memory of gold, slavery, contacts, movement, oceans, beaches, shorelines, people, and displacements. The pieces are constructed from organic and inorganic materials, objects that were once desired and purchased, used and worn, carried and discarded, left to wash out and carried back in.

Castaways is a continual work in progress. My intention is to regularly return to collect and transform the prima materia in an act of re-cognition of the despoiling of sand and water, and re-connection with the places that inspired the project.

The Whitworth Art gallery in Manchester, in collaboration with the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, will show 1,000 Castaways with sound and film environments from the 19th of May until July 2007, as part of the U.K remembrance of 200 years since the act of abolition of slavery.

I first saw Virginia Ryan’s Castaways in 2004, I found them quite echoic. In their material tactility, color, volume, and assemblage they were audible to me as a complete sound environment. Viewing some one hundred Castaways on Ryan’s Accra studio floor, I felt as though I was putting my ear to a huge seashell and listening to the detritus of history.

In the rows of objects I could hear the washing-up-and-out sounds that deposited Virginia Ryan’s raw data, her signs of multiple human and material pasts, on the shorelines of Ghana in the present. Anomabo Shoreline is a composition that responds to this way of hearing the visual material of Ryan’s Castaways, creating for and with them an acoustic memory of where the Gold Coast becomes the Black Atlantic.

Composed from recordings made at several locations along the Anomabo beach, this composition is both a stand-alone listening document and part of a sound installation to accompany exhibition of Castaways.

Where Water Touches Land

Video on DVD, 15 minutes
Steven Feld

Filmed and photographed at Anomabo beach, and at Virginia Ryan’s studio in Accra, Ghana, this short documentary follows Ryan on one of her expeditions to Anomabo to collect environmental data for Castaways, and then back to her studio where we see the transformative process by which the works are created.

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