Ways of seeing the penal colony

New Caledonia and French Guiana / Façons de voir le bagne: la Guyane et la Nouvelle-Calédonie

Claire Reddleman  

This series of 15 digital collages explores overseas sites of the former French penal colonies – known collectively as the bagne – and uses digital photography and collage to offer new ways of seeing these rich and varied places. The collages are, perhaps, a quixotic attempt to simultaneously address and communicate something to English-speaking audiences about a history that I think we tend to hear little of, but also to resist offering a singular cartographic or photographic image that will stand for the full complexity of this history and these places. The collages attempt to offer a new and original way of seeing the remains of the bagne as they appeared in 2018, when I carried out documentary photography at many sites.

This artwork comes out of postdoctoral research carried out as part of Postcards from the bagne: tourism in the shadow of France’s overseas penal history, a research project led by Dr Sophie Fuggle and funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. We visited former sites of the bagne in Nouvelle Calédonie / New Caledonia (SW Pacific) and Guyane / French Guiana (NE South America). Some sites are well preserved or repurposed as visitor centres and cultural heritage resources, such as at St-Laurent-du-Maroni (Guyane) and Nouville (Nouvelle Calédonie), the respective “hubs” of the penal colonies. Other sites are presented for touristic consumption through signage, providing some historical background to the remains that can be seen by visitors; while other sites are unmarked and not actively brought to visitors’ attention. Some buildings have been repurposed and are in active use, while others exist as ruins; and some are parts of private property and not open to visiting. This variety in terms of the heritage status of penal sites was a factor that I thought was important to respond to in the artistic works. There is not – yet – one official heritage story of the bagne, and nor am I advocating for one to be established. Nor have I opted to create a map that could function as a “definitive” guide to the historical and contemporary spatial distribution of the bagne, although I do think such a map would be useful. Rather, I have attempted to engage with the ambiguity of the bagne in its various identities: as a historical entity that was created by France partly in order to expel human beings from France, yet at the same time appropriated and colonised places with established peoples and cultures into the political and material body of France; as an entity whose material traces in the world are subject to weathering and decay, and to mixed approaches to preservation; and as a globe-spanning political and social historical entity, whose complexity I do not want to reduce to “just” buildings and ruins, knowable through their locations. 

Which places count as sites of the penal colony is not a straightforward matter, either. Forced labour was imposed throughout the bagne in both Nouvelle Calédonie and Guyane, and took a variety of forms, including mining, road-building, logging, building, agriculture and railway construction, meaning that the labour of bagnards has shaped the infrastructure, appearance and economy of both places in ways that are not always easy to see. Extracting this labour was one of the principal purposes of the penal colony, but it does not offer an easy substrate on which to write a heritage story. Ruins offer a more ready focal point, but in a colonial context of nation-building and wealth extraction, dwelling on them can encourage us to develop a sense that the penal colony was principally about imprisoning people in buildings.

These ideas led us to try to move away from repeating clichéd depictions of dramatic ruins. While some remains are very striking and can be beautiful and moving, I have tried to offer a way of seeing and imagining the bagne that makes room for the mundane as well as the dramatic, infrastructure as well as prison, and historic as well as contemporary imagery.

I began with a process of collecting, repeating the appropriation carried out by the colonial power, simultaneously treasuring and destroying, acquisitive and aggressive. One of my main purposes in the research project was to create a digital archive of documentary photography, which is now available to all via figshare.com, and photographing was my main method of collecting the bagne (including making cyanotypes, a form of cameraless photography). I also collected and pressed plants from many sites, as well as remnants of fabrics, pieces of litter and samples of soil, as signs of lives lived in the present. I gathered views of archival maps, by working in the archives at Aix-en-Provence, Cayenne, and Noumea, and photographing many but by no means all of their cartographic holdings, as well as viewing and downloading digitised maps from the online collection of the Archives nationales d’outre-mer. I also collected screen grabs of map apps, particularly in French Guiana (where having a UK-based mobile phone contract in 2018 meant that I was able to make use of data roaming, as French Guiana is part of the EU), including GPS drawings, and remotely collected cartographic views from Google Earth. Tourist maps and postcards also became part of the collection. In both New Caledonia and French Guiana, maps featured prominently in the selection of postcards for sale, as well as being repeated across other touristic goods such as packets of coffee, table cloths, sarongs, key rings, mugs, T-shirts and paperweights. In French Guiana it was particularly striking that the map shape of the territory was frequently (though not always) used in isolation from its geographic neighbours, Brazil, Suriname, and the Atlantic Ocean, effectively depicting the territory as an island. 

After the collecting stage came the process of selection and collage, which moved through numerous drafts. The collages were created using Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. I have worked in collage in previous creative projects,[1] and wanted to make use of its ability to incorporate complexity, disjointedness and fragmentation into a new whole. While the collages do not aim to be didactic or to carry any kind of message, they are intended to enable multiple views of the historical and contemporary bagne to coexist in such a way that a simple or settled story is refused.

For example, the collage focusing on the Îles du Salut, French Guiana – Untitled (Îles du Salut – Fort Teremba – St Laurent du Maroni – Île aux Lepreux / Île de la Quarantaine – Île des Pins) – incorporates many of these collected elements.

The fabric ground of the collage was collected from the island in the River Maroni known as both Île aux Lépreux / Île de la Quarantaine, a site used to relegate and isolate convicts suffering from leprosy, which is now uninhabited and used as a picnicking site. The map at the centre was made in 1864,[2] planning new military fortifications for the islands for the following year, and carefully depicting the buildings of the bagne without making any mention of the islands as a penal colony. Laid over this map is a second map of the islands, extracted from the Atlas des Colonies Francaises,[3] bringing together the historical moment of the penal colony in the 1930s with its earlier existence in the 1860s. Further layers are formed by GPS drawings depicting my two visits to the islands; a blue fragment from a photograph of an illuminated map display in the museum at Fort Teremba, New Caledonia, depicting Fort Teremba itself; a yellow piece of fabric collected from the ruin of the former jetty at St Laurent du Maroni, French Guiana; and a leaf gathered at Île des Pins, New Caledonia. These disparate pieces of imagery insist on a connection between sites in New Caledonia and French Guiana as the principal manifestations of the penal colony. I hope they also make room to reflect on the ambivalent and imperfect processes of collection, selection and preservation of heritage sites and materials.

Access the digital exhibition at https://www.clairereddleman.com/#/ways-of-seeing-the-penal-colony/

Find out more about the Postcards from the bagne research project at www.cartespostalesdubagne.com

Author

Claire Reddleman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester, and previously taught digital humanities at King’s College London, working on digital cultural heritage, visual methods, mapping and contemporary art. Prior to this she carried out postdoctoral research as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Postcards from the bagne’ led by Dr Sophie Fuggle, using visual research methods to engage with the history of France’s penal colonies. This research looks at collage as a critical artistic method, as does Claire's PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, and her thesis is now available as a research monograph from Routledge titled 'Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps'. Claire previously gained a MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, and a BA (Hons) in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Reading. She is also a photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman.com and tweets @reddlemap

Notes

[1] Reddleman, C. (2015). The deep mapping of Pennine Street: a cartographic fiction. Humanities, 4(4), 760-774. ‘Pennine Street’ is also presented on my website, www.clairereddleman.com, alongside another collage-based research project, #GinkgosOfTheBritishIsles.

[2] From the collection of the archives national d’outre mer, Aix-en-Provence, France. Available at http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/ulysse/osd?id=FR_ANOM_14DFC1468A&q=&coverage=Guyane%20française&type=Carte%20ou%20plan&mode=list&id=FR_ANOM_14DFC1468A

[3] From the collection of the archives national d’outre mer, Aix-en-Provence, France. Grandidier, G. (1932-33) Atlas des colonies françaises, protectorats et territoires sous mandat de la France.           

Paris : Société d'éditions géographiques, maritimes et colonials.