Exploring Black Cornish History at Kresen Kernow
Yesterday afternoon, the Carefree Welcome Group had the pleasure of visiting The Black Cornish History exhibition at Kresen Kernow which had been beautifully curated by 4Elementz a youth and community street art project led by Kelly Thorne. We began with a talk by Kelly herself, discussing the Afrofuturist inspired artwork she had produced in response to her research at Kresen Kernow into the history of black lives in Cornwall. One young person was particularly interested in the inclusion of Hoopoe birds in the images who they couldn’t quite believe migrated from Africa to Cornwall to breed every year.
The pieces depicted Black Cornish Tudors as well as Joseph Antonio Emidy, who after years of enslavement found freedom in Falmouth in 1799, partially owing to his incredible musical skills as a violinist which led him to become one of Cornwall’s most widely regarded musicians at the time and leader of the Truro Philharmonic orchestra. The images also included depictions of the more recent Windrush generation in Cornwall and Thandiwe Newton who grew up in Penzance and went on to become a Hollywood star.
“Cornwall is the end of the road and the port to the world: an ending and a beginning. We feel rooted by what is ancient around us”
Thandiwe Newton, We Wish: The Hopes and Dreams of Cornwall’s Children
From here we were given permission to enter the archives at Kresen Kernow with Alice Imbert. With 14 miles of shelving we were all astounded at the scale of the archives, from glass plates holding images of football matches to massive maps and plans we explored all the different types of documents that could be found. This led to a discussion of the huge importance of documents in the UK not just now but through history with birth registrations being archived from 1830 to the present day. One young person asked whether if they wrote down a record of their life since arriving in Cornwall could this be archived? Alice Imbert replied in the affirmative! We then spent some time in the Kresen Kernow library with young people finding old photos and drawings of the towns that they have been getting to know since arriving in Cornwall.
Downstairs we were shown a series of files and artefacts that had been selected as relevant to the exhibition including Richard Lander’s maps of the Niger river which provoked a discussion of the Scramble for Africa and registers showing interracial marriages in Cornwall in the 1700s. We were then told that, contrary to many assumptions, Falmouth could quite possibly have been more diverse in the 1700s as a major port and link to global trade than it is today.
We finished the afternoon sharing some snacks and doing photoshoots in the beautiful atrium of the Kresen Kernow building. Considering how much we were able to see and learn in the short space of a couple of hours it felt like we only got a small glimpse of the stories and histories that could be discovered in Cornwall.