Not Quite
by Jean- François Manicom

This is not quite a cotton thread with which their hands are playing: it is rather with their destiny, the fragile but surviving thread representing the life of millions of ancestors.

This is not quite a distaff that falls on the floor and bounces: it is rather the hope of generations of women, falling down but bouncing back centuries after centuries.

Those are not quite the Quarry Bank Mill machines we see and hear: it is rather the unstoppable and greedy industrial European machine adjusting to the plantation system.

This is not quite the library of Harewood House, those are not quite its gardens: rather, it is the repressed guilt, hidden within the secrets of wealth and in the unsaid apology.

This is not quite a dance it is rather bodies doing their best to move again and coming back to life.

This is not quite music it is rather sounds of muffled voices, calling for help and chanting for hope.

This is not quite a room with four screens it is rather the historical heart and geographical environment of a unique place in Europe.

It has not been quite a co-curation: rather, the work is made of multiple and subtle layers of knowledge, feelings, archives, expertise, pains, hopes, labour, skills, self-dedication, trust, in total hours of work that brought together agency and resilience.

It is not often that we can see ideas and emotions together in the same images. In “Am I not a Woman and Sister” we can feel the depth of both, unfolding in the slow and hypnotic performance recorded on the screen.

At the International Slavery Museum, our constant mission is to help visitors understand how something as absurd as slavery took place, comprehend something incomprehensible. With elegance, modesty and gravity, Elizabeth Kwant established a relationship of trust and collaboration with women who suffered in their flesh. They are the Parcae who thread a new connection and embodied relationship. Their bodies become what links two traumatic histories: that of the Transatlantic Slavery and that of modern slavery in its many versions.

This is not quite Contemporary Art: It is more than Art.


Jean- François Manicom is Curator at The International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, UK.