tech
January 18, 2026
Sweet thing: a personal look at a photographer’s Cuban slavery heritage
From the remnants of my great-grandparents’ Cuban home near the sugar plantation that is part of Unesco’s Slave Route programme – where they were once enslaved - to personal artefacts, each piece reconstructs an uncertain past
TL;DR
- Reconstructing a fragmented family history linked to Cuban sugar plantations and the slave trade through the art project "Sweet Thing."
- The project uses sugar as a symbolic motif and incorporates archival photographs, contemporary images, and self-portraits.
- The slave trade resulted in immense loss of life, with significant mortality rates during transit and on plantations.
- Historical records indicate brutal control methods used on enslaved people, including torture and public punishment.
- The difficulty in tracing ancestry is exacerbated by the systematic erasure of enslaved individuals' identities and histories.
- The art project explores themes of displacement, survival, and the fragile nature of inherited memory.
- The artist reflects on how mass social phenomena like slavery can lead to the loss of historical memory.
- Remembering the past is presented as an ethical act and a refusal to let lives be consigned to silence.
Continue reading the original article