Interior, Brechin Castle Sugar Factory, Trinidad, West Indies

Inscriptions

Printed, below image: Interior, Brechin Castle Sugar Factory, Trinidad, West Indies

Label

The consumption of sugar at the scale normalized today was only possible through exploited labor on stolen lands. Sugarcane thrives in warm, humid conditions, and colonial empires were intentional in their occupation of countries such as Cuba and the West Indies where sugarcane could flourish.

Course History

WRIT 5, Expository Writing, William Craig, Winter 2014

ANTH 33, AAAS 83.8, LACS 38, Global Caribbean, Chelsey Kivland, Spring 2019

ANTH 55.01, Anthropology of Global Health, Anne Sosin, Fall 2022

Art History 20.04, Faith and Empire, Beth Mattison, Spring 2023

Anthropology 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Charis Boke, Summer 2024

First Year Student Enrichment Program, Rachel Obbard, Summer 2024

Exhibition History

From the Field: Tracing Foodways Through Art, Owen Robertson Cheatham Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 8-November 3, 2024.

In Residence: Contemporary Art at Dartmouth, Hood Museum of Art, Harrington Gallery, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 18-July 6, 2014.

Pablo Delano has long been fascinated with the Caribbean island of Trinidad. In 2008 he published In Trinidad, a remarkable book of photographs that reflected the island’s complex history, cultural traditions, public rituals, and post-colonial identity. In 2012 Delano returned to Trinidad and embarked on a new series of photographs that documented the abandoned sugar factories and crumbling mansions owned by their former managers. Like the photographs he made for In Trinidad, these works address the legacy of colonialism in post-independence Trinidad. However, while the earlier series depicted the diversity of Trinidad’s multiethnic communities, these new works are eerily depopulated. The titles of these photographs, which are deliberately factual and long-winded, are intended to evoke the captions assigned to photographs of similar buildings in colonial guidebooks. The decayed ruins are a visible reminder that the economy of this Caribbean island once depended on the exploitation of African slaves to feed the seemingly insatiable demand, in both Europe and the United States, for luxury food items like sugar, coffee, and cocoa. Following emancipation, British companies like Tate & Lyle arranged for indentured workers from India, another colony in the British Empire, to replace slave labor on the plantations of Trinidad by working under appalling conditions in these newly constructed factories, many of which were in operation until fairly recently.

Publication History

Michael R. Taylor and Gerald Auten, In Residence: Contemporary Artists at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2013, ill. p. 99 , no. 89

Provenance

The artist, West Hartford, Connecticut; sold to present collection, 2013.

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Subjects