Interior, Brechin Castle Sugar Factory, Trinidad, West Indies
Pablo Delano, Puerto Rican, born 1954
2012
Pigment print on paper
Overall: 22 × 17 in. (55.9 × 43.2 cm)
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the Elizabeth and David C. Lowenstein '67 Fund
© Pablo Delano
2013.40.2
Geography
Place Made: Puerto Rico, Caribbean, Central America
Period
21st century
Object Name
Photograph
Research Area
Photograph
Not on view
Inscriptions
Printed, below image: Interior, Brechin Castle Sugar Factory, Trinidad, West Indies
Label
The consumption of sugar at the scale normalized today was only possible through exploited labor on stolen lands. Sugarcane thrives in warm, humid conditions, and colonial empires were intentional in their occupation of countries such as Cuba and the West Indies where sugarcane could flourish.
The shadowed mountains of hand-cut sugarcane in Dmitri Baltermants’s photograph indicate the sheer scope of sugar processing in Cuba. This photo was taken in the 1970s, during the Cuban sugar industry’s early period of decline due to U.S. embargos. In contrast, Pablo Delano’s 2012 photographs show the abandoned sugar factories in the West Indies—these once-bustling facilities are now in a state of decay, their massive machinery left to rust.
Course History
WRIT 5, Expository Writing, William Craig, Winter 2014
ANTH 33, AAAS 83.8, LACS 38, Global Caribbean, Chelsey Kivland, Spring 2019
ANTH 55.01, Anthropology of Global Health, Anne Sosin, Fall 2022
Art History 20.04, Faith and Empire, Beth Mattison, Spring 2023
Exhibition History
In Residence: Contemporary Art at Dartmouth, Hood Museum of Art, Harrington Gallery, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 18-July 6, 2014.
Pablo Delano has long been fascinated with the Caribbean island of Trinidad. In 2008 he published In Trinidad, a remarkable book of photographs that reflected the island’s complex history, cultural traditions, public rituals, and post-colonial identity. In 2012 Delano returned to Trinidad and embarked on a new series of photographs that documented the abandoned sugar factories and crumbling mansions owned by their former managers. Like the photographs he made for In Trinidad, these works address the legacy of colonialism in post-independence Trinidad. However, while the earlier series depicted the diversity of Trinidad’s multiethnic communities, these new works are eerily depopulated. The titles of these photographs, which are deliberately factual and long-winded, are intended to evoke the captions assigned to photographs of similar buildings in colonial guidebooks. The decayed ruins are a visible reminder that the economy of this Caribbean island once depended on the exploitation of African slaves to feed the seemingly insatiable demand, in both Europe and the United States, for luxury food items like sugar, coffee, and cocoa. Following emancipation, British companies like Tate & Lyle arranged for indentured workers from India, another colony in the British Empire, to replace slave labor on the plantations of Trinidad by working under appalling conditions in these newly constructed factories, many of which were in operation until fairly recently.
Publication History
Michael R. Taylor and Gerald Auten, In Residence: Contemporary Artists at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2013, ill. p. 99 , no. 89
Provenance
The artist, West Hartford, Connecticut; sold to present collection, 2013.
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