Michelle Eistrup

TOO LONG ARE OUR MEMORIES by
Michelle Eistrup and James Muruiki
“Send out some people to settle Because - it is there for the picking”. “Thousands of acres from them ”. (Q.C. Dudley Thompson, 2008

Single channel video- 9 mins
Sound: Anders Juhl

An old grass black doll sits in a mantle, her eyes are nearly gone, a white and brown deer slope in between the fantasy and the imaginary, a girl picks coffee and a seer stands with a mirror reflecting the woody white wintery landscape around him. A voice slips in and out of the passages: ‘The Kenyans could not plant coffee, they could not plant sisal…’… Memories from another time... Dudley Thompson, a lawyer who witnessed and assembled the primary defense team of Kenyata, recollects and describes the tension between the British colonizers and Kenyans. Old pictures on a wall, references to the past, the Kenyan Railway, royalty, Mombasa, versus the workers, the builders, who died to construct that lunatic line. This work is a meditation on the interaction and shifts that exist between these realities and questions our historical perspectives in connection to those times. There is redemption as well, , we see three black workers reclaiming their train, dancing in and out of its remains to the symbolic music of freedom: jazz and ska. The souls of colonial maids and workers are suspended over the train and walk through different time dimensions arriving today as immigrants in the cold North, finding balance on the sharp cliff edges of this past. Too long are Our Memories speeds, splices and interweaves animated form through the juxtaposition of many visual layers and sounds into imaginary spaces, presenting worlds where the path of dislocation, migration and movement leads humans in their search of a future.