ABSTRACT
This visual essay derives from a short film titled Nothing Ever Goes Away. The film represents a mode of research into an object––a sterling silver fish slice––drawn from my own family’s archive. This object was purchased with money made from sugar plantations in the Caribbean, a fact commemorated (even celebrated) by a crest engraved upon it. Regardless of the enormous violence that made the possession of such an object possible, it has been passed down generations. No longer used in formal dining situations, this piece of silverware reveals a series of political, legal, material, and aesthetic operations that keep the slavery alive in the present. Modeling the ways in which white families sequester and transmit wealth as cultural and aesthetic capital, it is a prism of everyday practices and filial gestures, a repertoire that is not well documented, but which registers in the objects around which it gathers. It is one thing to reveal the object’s complicity with mass violence, and another to know what to do with it. Alongside deconstructing the object’s gestural habitus, this film closes with a speculative enactment of the object’s destruction, asking if and how we might surrender its violent legacy.
