Joy Gregory and Philip Miller Seeds of Empire in Black Anthropocenes

British photographer Joy Gregory and South African composer Philip Miller’s exhibition Seeds of Empire: A Little or No Breeze (2021) was a very personal, research-based body of work, shown at Empire House, a Georgian townhouse in Lambeth, London (UK). The collaborative works explore and experiment with the representation of an enslaved Black individual named Rose, by taking up natural scientist Hans Sloane’s medical and weather observations from 1687 to 1689 and published in his A Voyage to… Jamaica.

The artworks combine effects of coloniality and forms of plant knowledge of the Caribbean with contemporary Jamaicans’ testimonies on migration to the United Kingdom. The Anthropocene, specifically Black Anthropocenes, critically frame these events. The artists’ engagement with historic sources that originate in the plantation system and its inherent violence, turn to becoming British in the present however by re-performing the past, thereby shaping a long history from the sixteenth century onwards.