Existing comment:
Witness.
Paa Joe documents a building that beheld a depraved and dreadful history.
Forts at Anomabu traded hands between the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and, finally, Britain from the mid-17th century. Of all the European forts built on what was then termed the Gold Coast, Fort William was one of the only to have a prison purposely built within its walls to hold enslaved peoples awaiting transport for forced labor in the Americas. The fort was the center of the British market in captured peoples until the trade was outlawed in 1807.
Paa Joe is one of the best-known and prolific innovators of a new art form that has developed on the outskirts of Accra in the last half century -- "fantasy coffins," sculpted in a wide variety of forms that memorialize their future residents' key accomplishments in life. In the style of these coffins, Paa Joe created a series of architectural models of Ghana's coastal forts -- global sites of memory, conscience, and loss. |