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Video installation
by Sonia Boyce
Directed by Sonia Boyce and David Bickerstaff
Filmed and edited by David Bickerstaff
Video | 2 x 16:9 | 15 minutes
Crop Over is a newly commissioned multi-screened video and sound
work by Sonia Boyce, which premieres at Harewood
House. The video installation comprises of two large screens
on opposite walls of the gallery and is accompanied by drawings.
Crop Over’s development began with Boyce’s interest
in the Crop Over festival in Barbados. Crop Over carnival is a harvest
festival that originates out of the conditions of plantation life
and sugar production in the Caribbean. The film opens with a beautiful
stillness and the sound of running water as the camera pans across
the formal garden and grounds of Harewood House. Stilt Man wanders
through the majestic gardens, confidently negotiating the grounds
of this beautiful English country house, his fantastic costume is
both admiral-like and carnivalesque.
We are then transported to the broody skies that
hang over the sugar cane fields in Barbados and to the splendour
of a plantation house. The plantation house echoes the grandeur
of Harewood but is surrounded by an avenue of exotic palm trees,
a pool of water lilies and lotus flowers. Here we are asked to consider
the cultivated landscape of both Barbados and Britain, and we are
reminded of who owned, worked on and now enjoys these different
landscapes.
The Crop Over festival comes out of the convergence
of these different histories and spaces. As the film unfolds cultural
historians comment on the folk characters of the Crop Over festival,
giving us an insight into their history and contemporary meaning.
The contemplative nature of the film changes as we are taken directly
to the pinnacle of the Crop Over festival, Grand Kadooment Day.
Surrounded by Mas bands, dancers and street revellers, we are submerged
into the heady world of masquerade and the carnivalesque.
Crop Over is a project by Sonia Boyce and
was commissioned by Harewood House Trust and the National Art Gallery
Committee, Barbados, with financial support from the Arts Council
of England and the Prime Minister’s Office, Barbados.
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