A Question of Preservation
The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation, a project from designer Yassine Ben Abdallah (image: Femke Reijerman).
Machetes are displayed within museum storage, their forms amber, brown and dripping. Each blade has been cast from sugar and is melting in the heat of the room, drips running down from the cutting edge and pooling beneath. Some machetes are collapsing and shearing off, resolving themselves into puddles of sticky, saccharine-scented caramel.
This is The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation, the graduation project from designer Yassine Ben Abdallah. Exhibited as part of Design Academy Eindhoven's graduation show during last week’s Dutch Design Week, and produced through Ben Abdallah’s work on the school’s Geo-Design MA programme, the project was selected by the Design Academy as the 2022 recipient of its prestigious Gijs Bakker Award, a prize given to “an outstanding Master graduate whose thesis research and design project demonstrate outstanding skill and imagination, tenacity and originality, personality and relevance to the profession and the outside world.”
Image: Florian Lafosse.
The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation engages with the colonial history of La Réunion, an island off the coast of east Africa and an overseas département of France. In his work, Ben Abdallah wished to interrogate the history of enslaved and indentured labourers on the island’s sugar plantations. La Réunion has been shaped by its sugarcane monoculture, but in spite of this Ben Abdallah found that few material traces from the plantations had been conserved. Those that have been preserved are exclusively objects that belonged to the island’s white masters.
It is these questions of what is preserved, and what is erased, that Ben Abdallah’s project engages with. Presented during the graduation show within metal shelving intended to evoke museological archives, the project recasts the workers’ machetes as caramel forms, allowing them to ooze and break down over the course of the day. Exploring ideas of permanence, restitution and heritage, The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation offers an insight into design’s ability to grapple with history and the contested communicative power of objects and artefacts.
To find out more, Disegno spoke with Ben Abdallah about his work and the future of the project. An edited version of this conversation follows below.
Disegno How did you start working on this project?
Yassine Ben Abdallah Quite early in my research I was interviewing people affected by the monoculture of sugarcane in La Réunion and, at the same time, I was trying to find a way to deal with material research when the only material available was sugar itself. The only history and archive available is the oral history passed down by families, so I was really grateful for those people who took the time to tell me their specific stories. At the same time, I came to the topic with a certain binary: there was a part of the plantation taking advantage of the other. But I realised that the reality was more complex. Even though our culture and the identity of the island comes from the story of violence, people are still attached to it. They work with this violence within their own identity.
Image: Jeroen Van De Gruiter.
Disegno In what way?
Yassine A creole culture is a culture of confrontation. I have stories of people whose grandparents would forbid them from speaking Creole, considering it a language of the enslaved – they felt, in a certain way, you had to whiten yourself to elevate yourself. So you have confrontation within the family itself. You have stories of colourism, for example, and of people hoping to have kids with lighter skin.
“Even though our culture and the identity of the island comes from the story of violence, people are still attached to it. They work with this violence within their own identity. ”
Disegno Your project mentions that the physical artefacts that might have told this story haven’t been preserved.
Yassine That was one of the most frustrating parts of my research. I was trying to find traces, but there was nothing. No machetes left over. For me, it was an occasion as a designer to ask this question of, “How do I position myself within my own community? What do I bring as a designer?” It's this idea of trying to visualise oral histories in a certain way.
Disegno What is that process like, because on the one hand you want a visualisation that can draw people into the story and make it legible, but you also don’t want to create anything that flattens the complexity of the issue.
Yassine It wasn't a linear process at all. I tried many different things around working with machetes and repurposing old machetes. The sugar machete appeared as an idea at some point, but I didn't know how to contextualise it in my story. It was this intuitive process of making something, but not yet having the history behind it.
Image: Florian Lafosse.
Disegno Are they technically challenging to make?
Yassine Yes. I initially cast real machetes to make silicone moulds, but caramelising the sugar is just a really long process – I watched a lot of YouTube tutorials with pastry chefs. It’s quite time consuming and the other thing is how quickly they break down. That’s something I don't control. Each machete is unique and, at the same time, every story is unique. I think it allowed me to show that colonialism is not only an abstract concept. It is a smell, it is a shape, it is a taste for certain people.
Disegno It’s very visceral. There’s something quite sickly about how they melt. There’s the sweet smell and it’s almost grotesque how the sugar drips down and spreads across the space. Was that something which you accounted for in advance?
Yassine In the beginning, I was trying to conserve them: I was using varnish and felt the need to preserve this object. It was completely absurd, but the sugar was telling its own story – this story of dripping away and this need to let it go. So I felt like this came from the process. I couldn’t force the sugar to behave any other way.
“It allowed me to show that colonialism is not only an abstract concept. It is a smell, it is a shape, it is a taste for certain people.”
Disegno There’s something interesting about the fact that you’re having to continually remake these machetes – it’s an active process to tell this story that you have to continually reinforce. Often engagement with colonial histories can be very one-time: people don’t account for the ongoing work that is needed to tell these stories and keep them present.
Yassine The biggest challenge is that I'm working with this idea of linearity, because museums have this pretension to be timeless – this idea that they're preserving things that are behind us. For me, having a dripping machete shows how colonialism continues to drip into the present. How do we work with this constantly happening? I learned a lot through the making itself, which is really humbling. This constant making is a kind of mourning, and to mourn you need to remember. There’s a need for this very active action of making.
Image: Jeroen Van De Gruiter.
Disegno The museological context seems essential to the work. It’s certainly essential to your display in Eindhoven.
Yassine In the plantation museum in La Réunion, the only objects exhibited are those of the white masters. I asked myself how we could tell our story when we have no objects to testify to our history. Having dripping machetes was a good way to try to stain a static space, the space of the museum, and to have something more confrontational. Museums try to conserve objects for eternity, but there’s this question of whether everything is meant to be conserved forever. Here I’ve recontextualised it to look like a museum depot, because of the stolen artefacts sleeping in Dutch museums at the moment. It's reflecting on the life and death of objects, and whether they’re meant to be preserved forever or do you allow them a certain burial? During the Black Lives Matter movement, there were a lot of questions about what do we do with statues. Should we bring them to the museum? But [Cameroonian historian and political theorist] Achille Mbembe had this beautiful saying that the West doesn't need any more cultural institutions for objects, it needs funeral institutions to be able to bury them. I think the museum depot, in a certain way, is in this in-between space. I really like this idea of how we can let go.
Image: Florian Lafosse.
Disegno There's a clear privilege involved in what gets preserved. As your project points out, one reason that no machetes were preserved is that the metal was melted down and used for other objects.
Yassine Indeed. There's this pretension of purity to stop time with the preservation of an object, whereas I feel history is way more fluid. The identity of the island is in constant movement and having hybrid objects, or fluid objects, that are transformed and continue to live may be an interesting way for us to talk about heritage and memory, and to keep them alive.
“ What’s interesting is how specific the machete is, how symbolic it is, in La Réunion. It’s not only a tool of violence, it is really connected to the land.”
Disegno Are you curious about how the project will read in other places? It being displayed in the Netherlands seems very different to it being displayed in La Réunion
Yassine Of course – my final aim is really to bring this work back to La Réunion. What's interesting is how specific the machete is, how symbolic it is, in La Réunion. It's not only a tool of violence, it is really connected to the land. People who know the meanings of the symbol may have different interpretations than here. The plantation Museum in La Réunion sits in one of the oldest plantations and all the population that live around there are mostly descendants of the enslaved who worked in this plantation. But those people do not go to the museum or have no access to it. So how do we recontextualise such a space?
Disegno Why is that community not using that space?
Yassine Because the museum has always been a space of social exclusion to a certain extent. Now there are movement in the United States, for example, that talk about abolishing the museum and questioning whether it could become a base for the community. I’m asking myself this question – can this space be something useful for the community?
Interview Oli Stratford