WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > WE DEH HERE

HERITAGE HUB
THURSDAY 1 – SUNDAY 4 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 9′ (looped)

Content warning: contains flashing imagery; discussion of colonialism, slavery.  

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Maybelle Peters began a residency with Alchemy Film & Arts in 2024. The project set out to explore the artist’s mother’s maiden name, Scotland, and to respond to the colonial threads embedded within it. The result is an immensely personal work that is also impressive in its historic reach.

Presented here in its first public iteration, We Deh Here is a film projected from 16mm, which Peters has sewn directly into, accompanied by endearing audio conversations between the artist and her mother. Also on display is the fourth edition of Who Is Who in British Guiana 1945 – 1948, a 650-page directory (first published 1937) and bedrock of genealogical research, which provided Peters a crucial starting point in tracing colonial and matrilineal threads.

The film itself consists of digital stills of, among other things, gravestones in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard Cemetery and a plaque at Tain Royal Academy in the Highlands. These sites, whose function and value aren’t immediately clear, are juxtaposed with scans of nineteenth-century maps, produced in pen, ink and watercolour to plot settlements and slave plantations along British Guiana’s Berbice and Demerara rivers. Gnomic fragments of text, suggestive of some cut-up epitaph, are repeatedly superimposed.

The power of We Deh Here’s associative logic is cumulative. It isn’t just that Peters invokes connections between sites by virtue of their sequential placement; it’s also that the images themselves recur – as if a second or third look will yield new knowledge about these locales and their interrelation. The work’s narrative opacity speaks to the artist’s sleuth-like speculations, necessitated by her own navigation of institutional archives and their strategic deployment of fragmentation, obfuscation and erasure in documenting Scotland’s role in the enslavement of African people.

Transferring her assembly of images to analogue film, Peters has made an object – one that speaks to notions of permanence, ephemera and reproduction in archival practices while itself functioning as a kind of memorialisation. Projected like so, the cold digitality of the artist’s photographs is made to glow and shimmer. The images acquire a life, an appreciable movement: a demonstration, perhaps, that the histories referenced here only appear to be static. The undead residues of colonialism persist in and across discrete data: in the gravestones of plantation owners, for instance, or at the locations of buildings they built.

To mark We Deh Here’s premiere, we have commissioned a new essay by David Alston. Read David’s essay.

Maybelle also spoke to Alchemy Trustee Rhea Storr about her processes in making the work and the themes it investigates. Watch Maybelle’s chat with Rhea.