The Sugar Games

In the history of sugar, desire and violence converge. The desirability of sugar in Europe brought economic success to a privileged few, and cane sugar was shipped to the port of Gothenburg from slave plantations on the other side of the Atlantic. Sugar refineries emerged in the city, and merchant families made substantial profits from refining sugar. The sugar trade was therefore an important industry in Gothenburg, yet despite this it has received very little attention in historical writing. It helped shape the city’s development, leaving traces that continue to affect us today. The city’s collective memory rarely encompasses the period before the introduction of beet sugar, nor does it include many of the stories and events that reveal our entanglement in colonial structures and perceptions. The Gothenburg narrative is centred on shipping and trade, but is primarily associated with adventure, entrepreneurship and freedom rather than colonialism.

Using as its starting point a diary from 1836 written by the middle-class woman Marie Vougt, which contains numerous references to sugar, the Sugar Games leads us to six locations in the city: Brunnsparken, Liseberg, Postgatan, Majnabbe, Klippan and Änggården. At each location, hidden and forgotten colonial traces and stories are uncovered and set in motion. We move through different layers of time, from the eighteenth century to the present day.

An important part of the work involves developing decolonial strategies for dealing with incomplete, fragmented and violent narratives in the archives, where those affected rarely have a voice of their own. New stories and events connected to these sites are also developed in collaboration with seven invited artists, who contribute their artistic responses to the map. In this way, a narrative, associative and multidimensional mapping of the city takes shape. Methods drawn from the performing arts permeate the investigation.

The Sugar Games brings to light stories that have largely been invisible in historical accounts. The stories included on the map are often complex and may contain contradictions and unexpected turns. They have also been continually tested through dialogue with others and through several exploratory walks through the city, thereby becoming a spoken, living and relational practice. The mapping moves across different kinds of sources, forms of expression, places and temporalities, bringing together and setting into play different bodies, spaces, voices, histories and memories. In this way, it contributes to an anti-colonial chronology through which we can remember anew, in a space between public history and artistic creation.

This complex and multidimensional mapping generates unexpected connections, overlaps and entanglements, allowing other stories about Gothenburg’s colonial history to emerge, linking past and present.