Possible Refuge in the Still Forest

I film a lot wherever I am so both films have parts shot in Scotland, Africa or the Caribbean, and they’re meant to create these linkages between these places, but also to try to speak about refuge. Is it possible to even have refuge? I am still haunted by the idea of these people left behind and there is nothing for them. How is that rebuilding possible? Whilst I still feel incredibly haunted by what’s going on there (because I worry about what’s going to happen to my family every time the hurricane season happens, that they might be wiped out by the devastation of the storms), I try to have hope in making the work, that it’s possible to create empathy through sharing moments and considering these ideas together in the films or in the installation, that we can find a greater fellow feeling. I want people to consider the numbness which might stop them from feeling, to allow themselves to understand their own precarity, how they need to work with others and be collaborative in their mindset and the ways in which they work.

– Alberta Whittle in Fernando Chaves Espinach ‘‘I would like people to listen more’: An interview with Alberta Whittle’, LUX, November 5, 2019

The 1968 Hurricane was a deadly storm that moved through the central belt of Scotland. At the time it was the worst gale in the United Kingdom with the strongest wind gust ever recorded. 20 people were killed and 700 left homeless.Many trees were windthrown across the central belt.  The total volume estimated to have been windthrown was 45.5 million hoppus feet (1.6 million cubic metres). Photographic records from the archives show some of the casualties in the Edinburgh Garden. Dawyck Botanic Garden was still in private ownership at the time of the storm. Many of the specimen trees in the garden survived but the damage to trees on the wider Estate was extensive. This was compounded by a second hurricane a year later and was one of the contributing factors that led to the Estate transferring ownership of the 60 acre Arboretum in 1979 to the nation. At Benmore, then under the ownership of the Forestry commission the storm felled more than 500 trees over 40m tall, some with girths more then 2.5m wide. It took 4 years to clear the storm damage.

– William Hinchliffe ‘The Hurricane of 1968’, on ‘Botanics Stories’ blog, January 15, 2018

Stills from Alberta Whittle’s 2019 film from the forest to the concrete ​(to the forest) from the artist’s website, currently on show at We Are History, curated by Ekow Eshun, interspersed with photographs from the 1968 Hurricane in Scotland its destructions of trees and forests, from the blog post by William Hinchcliffe.