Overview
Audrey Albert is a Mauritian-Chagossian visual artist and creative facilitator. Her research-led practice enables her to consider and investigate themes of mixed identity, collective memory and displacement.
For her commission exhibition, Audrey Albert has included works by other artists and researchers to consider the many questions around the self-determination of the Chagossians. These artworks respond to the unique Chagossian culture, and their guardianship of the archipelago, as belongers of the land, the sea, the flora and fauna.
The exhibition at Ffotogallery and programme of events seek to serve as a vehicle for conversation, for the Archipelago nation’s natives and descendants, and their ambition for future world-building. It questions how they reclaim, live and transmit culture and land as one.
Image Gallery
Communities and Places
Belongers considers how Chagossians represent themselves, how they reclaim and live their identities in countries that have never quite been “home”. Community participants were based in Mauritius, Wythenshawe and Crawley.
The Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean comprises of several islands, the largest of which is Diego Garcia. From the 16th century the group was claimed by European powers, including Britain, who in the 1800s declared it part of the British colony of Mauritius. The islands became home to generations of people who worked in the copra (coconut) industry.
In the 1960s, Britain agreed with the United States that a military base would be constructed on Diego Garcia, and turned the islands into a new colony – the British Indian Ocean Territory. The Chagossian people were forced to leave. They were told they would not be allowed to return. This process, later described by the British government as ‘shameful and wrong’, left thousands of people struggling to make new lives far from the place they called home.
Watch film
A short film about the process of making the Belongers exhibition.