 Good morning. Good morning everyone. Hi. I'm Dave, director of fermentation in NOMA's lab. In my job, I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia researching things that maybe there isn't published literature on. And I have to connect dots between things that maybe there aren't books written on already. So I spend a lot of time on there. And while Wikipedia isn't the perfect source of information, it is truth by consensus. And I trust it because truth by consensus can change by the people that speak those truths over time. Our next guest, Jeanette Ellers, cares very much about that idea. She deals with themes of visibility, disappearing, and collective memory. She forces people to look at things that perhaps they would rather ignore. She deals with video and visual art and a recent statue that was erected here in Copenhagen, I am Queen Mary, deals with a labor revolt in St. Croix in 1878. Today she's here to talk about her methods for theories and her ideas. So please welcome Jeanette Ellers. I'm so happy to be here and this has been such an inspiring weekend. Yeah, even though I don't deal with food, I deal with a lot of these topics that have been present to this symposium. So thank you everyone. I'm going to talk a little bit about my artwork which covers issues such as colonialism, slavery, counterculture, resistance, human trafficking. A lot of these issues that we have been touching upon that some of the guests have been touching upon. My point of departure is my affiliation with African diaspora. I was born and raised in Denmark, but I have Caribbean roots. Denmark was a slave trade nation for more than 200 years, which is actually a very unknown part of our history. It's not really a part of our self-understanding. So I'm trying to reveal these structures that came along with the colonial project that was established maybe 500 years ago when Columbus set out in the world and it's still impacting our society in many ways. As I said before, Denmark is really not dealing a lot with our colonial past. We're kind of disconnected from it in a way in denial. It's become better over the years, but we still have a long way to go. These structures, you see them globally, of course. They deal with, well, it's a consequence of global warming, racism. It has a great impact on everything that we deal with in our everyday life. So what actually started my investigation in history to talk about the now was a trip to Ghana. And as you can see behind me, there's one of my first images revolving around these issues. The image is called Atlantic Endless Row. And as I said before, Denmark was a colonial nation for more than 200 years. We deported enslaved Africans from the Gold Coast in Ghana. And this image deals with that. When I first came to Ghana, I didn't know much about our history. It really was like having a punch in my stomach. I felt it so greatly and it just impacted my life. It was a turning point in my life as well as in my artistic practice. In a very, very poetic, I think, and very simple way I try to deal with these complex issues. So as you can see in the image, I have erased the important part of the image, the people. So this is a very simple way to talk about erasure. Because by enslaving people, you erase everything. You erase the identity, you erase family, you erase language. You erase everything to suppress. It also talks about how we erased our history, this part of history. So I like to work in this simple way to raise complex issues. When I went to Ghana, I was very involved in all these issues of suppression and slavery. And I decided to follow in the footsteps of the transatlantic enslavement trade. So I also went to the Virgin Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands that were the former Danish Virgin Islands. They were sold to the U.S. in 1917. So last year was the Centennial of the sale. I also investigated the city of Copenhagen because the whole center of Copenhagen, the old part, actually where we are right now, is built from money from the slave trade. And the Danes are not very, as I already said many times, they're not very aware of that. But when you go to St. Croix or we go to St. Thomas, you see it everywhere. The architecture, the street names, everything just reminds you of the Danes were there. But I investigated and I went to a house in Denmark called Marienborg, which is our prime minister's official residence. It was built in 1744 by an officer called Alfred Fischer. He was involved in the trade as well. I mean everyone were at that point. But he built this summer house and as I said today is the official residence of the prime minister. But they don't, it doesn't say anything about the history, of course. But it was, and a lot of the merchants that lived there after Alfred Fischer, they were also involved in the trade. So I made a video there dealing with erasure, invisibility, and I used myself. I work a lot with performance, both live performance and on video. So I made a video there called Black Magic at the White House. I called it the White House because the house is white, but of course it's also a hint to the White House in the States. And this piece was made just after Obama was elected the first time. So I felt it was appropriate to call it that. And it's about three minutes long and I'm going to show it to you now. Provoke something and lead and guide. And you perceive art differently than you do if you're a politician or if you talk about it. So images, they just express much more. The next project I'm going to present for you is a live performance that I did called Whip It Good, which is actually both a live performance and I also did it as a video. I'm just going to show you a few images from it. This is from New Orleans. I've done it many places all over the world, but this is from New Orleans. It's a live performance in which I have a whip as my tool. And I rub the whip in crushed charcoal and then I paint, I whip a painting. I do that for a little while. Then I invite the audience to participate. So I just hold out the whip to whoever wants to take it. It's a very powerful performance and people are, if they don't engage directly, they're always very affected by it. And it's actually a performance that can provoke a bodily experience of this colonial project and the consequences and the effect that it has. This is from South Africa. I have a very story that I always, an anecdote that I always say when I did it in Copenhagen, one of the first times, I didn't expect people to participate because the Danes are normally very reserved, but they were lining up. And then when I came to South Africa a few months later, I did it in a white-owned gallery. There were a lot of white people, a lot of black people. None of the white people took the whip. So it really showed me how disconnected Danes are to the colonial past and how present it is for some people in, for instance, South Africa. I also did the performance as a video project inside of the former West Indian warehouse, which is actually across the river from here. And today it houses the Royal Cast Collection. As you can see in this image, there are some white sculptures behind me. And this building contains more than 2,000 of these copies of Western iconic sculptures from the ancient Greek times until the Renaissance. So I felt that it was an appropriate location for my performance to have these two sea histories clash, the black history of the black labors that built this country, and the white sculptures that represent white supremacy and all these things. This project was inspiration for the next project I'm going to talk about shortly. It's my collaboration project with Lavonne Bell, who is a visual artist from the Virgin Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands St. Croix. And it's called I Am Queen Mary. As I mentioned before, last year was the centennial of the sale of the Danish Virgin Islands to the U.S. It was marked in many different ways, and one of the ways that I contributed was to create this monument or sculpture in front of the warehouse. It was initiated in 2014 by a researcher called Hela Steenam. She wanted to make an exhibition in the warehouse, as well as an exhibition in a warehouse in St. Croix. The exhibition was supposed to be called Warehouse to Warehouse, to connect our nations again, our histories. For many reasons, financial and everything, it never happened. But I kept on to my idea. I wanted to make a sculpture outside of the warehouse. As you can see, there's a copy of Michelangelo's David standing right there alone. So my idea was, you know, he's not going to be alone. Let's challenge this history. So this is a very early sketch from 2015. But as you can see, it's inspired by the image from inside of the building where I'm sitting in the chair with a whip. So I wanted to have this huge black female as a counterpart to David. And along the way, the process, the narrative of Queen Mary, who was a leader of the labor revolt in 1878 in St. Croix, came along. She's a very powerful figure in the Virgin Islands. They sing songs about her. They have a highway named after her, but we don't know anything about her in Denmark. And she did an amazing job together with three other women, three other queens. They were all, for their deeds, they were all imprisoned in Denmark, also just across the water, and we don't know anything about that. But these are the prison records from when they were here. They were actually sentenced to death, but they changed it, and then they came here. So these queens were here, and we have to celebrate them, because what they did was amazing. The project is also very inspired and talks to other resistance movements, like this iconic image of Hugh P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther. It talks to I Am a Man, the demonstration in the 60s of the sanitary workers in the States, as well as of course today's Black Lives Matter, that was also founded by three queens. So it really talks to a global story. I invited Lavonne Bell to work with me, because she was working on her project on the other side of the globe in St. Croix, and she wanted to work with these, what do you call it, coral stones, because many of the houses in St. Croix or in the Caribbean, they are built of coral stones as bricks, and as you see in this image on the right side, the Danish bricks, on the left side, coral stones that were cut out of the ocean by enslaved Africans. They were sent out in the ocean to cut these to build houses. So these coral stones have a huge and powerful history inside them. So I invited her to work with me on this project, and we wanted to couple our projects. The base is built by her coral stones, and the actual sculpture is actually also a hybrid of our bodies. So not only do we fusion our narratives, we also fusion our bodies and our countries, our nations. And we did that, I'm going to show you some of the process images. This is Lavonne Bell sitting in the peacock chair. She is, let me see if I can do this, yeah. We use some very high technology, like body scanning, and we are both being body scanned, and then this is the raw material that came into the computer. The guy, the designer, he is coupling it. He is making, this is also a process image, as you can see there are forearms and yeah, many legs, but this is in the process. So this is a hybrid of us, but we are creating this new futuristic woman, something that hasn't been, but is becoming. And I like that image. This is an image of the prototype, which of course we needed to have before making the big one, and actually the big one is seven meter, like two stories, because it had to be just as large as David, of course, it couldn't be any smaller. And she is sitting, so she is really, really, really tall. This is an image of the head of the sculpture, because I have to say that there is a lot of fuss about it right now. We don't know if it can be permanent. Since it's an artist driven project, there has been a lot of work to do, and we weren't invited to do it, so we had to figure out a lot of things ourselves. And also funding was also a big issue, of course, so we couldn't make it in bronze, which we wanted to, and we wanted to have it permanently. But we just had to make this version first, so this is made in polystyrene. And the next step is to try to get it in bronze. This is from the inauguration in March, 31st of March this year. And this location, there's the Queen's Palace in Denmark. And her son is soon to become the king. His wife is called Mary, so she'll be Queen Mary, but there's a Queen Mary here first. Yeah. And it's really nice because a lot of people, they pass by every day, and I actually heard that people are coming to Denmark just to see it, and I'm very happy about that. Yeah, we got a lot of attention, because this is not only a Danish story, this is a global story. This is about representation. I grew up in Denmark as an Afro-Caribbean Danish person, and never really felt myself represented in the media. And this is a very white country, and also history, as I have said, is very whitewashed. So yeah, so it means a lot to me to have created something that represents a positive image, an empowering image of black people, and just like brown people. But it also speaks to a global story. And yeah, it's been so overwhelming to see all the attention it has got, and how much it means to a lot of people. And this is my last image. If you want to know more about the project, you can go to imqueenmary.com, and you can also follow the process. So thank you very much.