Tamarind Tales

Lene Asp, Mikkel Meyer

The montage Tamarind Tales connects colonially entangled environments in Ghana and Denmark interlinked by the presence of tamarind trees (tamarindus indica). The initial scene plays out in Kponko, Ghana, where William Nsuiban from the National Museum of Ghana counts the remaining tamarind trees from an allée built along an old existing footpath from the Christiansborg fort on the former Gold Coast up to the Frederiksgave plantation, at the foot of the Akwapim mountains. The trees were planted by Danish colonizers to provide shadow for when they were carried to the plantation in hammocks by African enslaved. Apparently, tamarinds were a favorite of the Danes, indicating their presence in various Ghanaian locations. Then follows an interview with Jesper Kurt Nielsen from the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen about his involvement in the project of rebuilding Frederiksgave and the broader plantation environment (the Frederiksgave Plantation and Common Heritage Site). Lastly, Ole Seberg, head of the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen, tells us about the heart of the botanical garden’s species collection, collected as part of the colonial endeavor to map the world and extract resources, and how also quite recently tamarind cuttings from Kponko made their way to the old colonial metropole.

The underlying premise of this story is the plight of climate change due to the geo-morphic agency on a large scale by humans in the modern global world system. A consequence of the colonial legacy in spaces and minds, and landscapes. We are curious to explore how tamarinds as a prism unfold stories about the changing and eroding landscapes, and how this reflects large-scale trends as summarized by concepts of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene or Plantationocene. How do the trees function as storied matter? That is thoroughly NOT as themes or tropes connecting places in a purely representational media ecology, but rather as active producers of environments and as co-creators of material archives for a humanist production of history. In what ways do they link up with other species and materialities as hybrid and traveling agencies and make themselves available to us as a storytelling resource, through a combination of biological conditions of growth and epistemological or ideological inclinations to preserve them instead of using them as firewood, for example? In short: How do the trees themselves push into the future archive of colonial history? And in addition: What are the different affordances offered by them to tell stories of contemporary affects and ambiances.

About

The montage takes its cue from a visit to a tamarind allée in Kponko Ghana, planted by Danish colonists, and traces the trees to the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen. Colonial history has interlinked the world we inhabit today and brought a multiplicity of perspectives together. Oftentimes in cultural confrontation as we recently saw in the decolonial protests that swept the globe during the Covid-19 pandemic, posing for us an important task: How to accommodate multi-perspectival storytelling of shared pasts in a globally entangled and environmentally threatened future?

This montage is an elaboration on overlapping and shared histories of the past as they take shape in present day soundscapes. The montage includes conversations with curator Jesper Kurt Nielsen from the National Museum of Denmark, professor Ole Seberg from the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen, and William Nsuiban from the National Museum of Ghana.

Contributor bios

Lene Asp is a published writer of fiction, translator and editor. In 2017 she developed the digital humanities project Mapping a Colony (mappingacolony.org) with funding from Europeana, and in continuation of this work she is now undertaking research about colonial environments from a media-archaeological and ecological perspective at the University of Linköping. She has an MA in Radio from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Mikkel Meyer is a programmer and composer with a special interest in sound and space. He has created audio works for among others Resonance FM, DR and the São Paulo Biennial. He is one third of the artist collective Vertigo, building large scale art pieces/public installations for among others CC (Copenhagen Contemporary) and SNFCC (Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center).