Soundwalk Walking piece details
| Language | Twi/Akan (in part) |
| Cost | Free |
Colston’s Last Journey is a work of perambulatory soundart. The work’s theme is Bristol and the Transatlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Africans. A sea of interactive audio is layered over the whole of Bristol city centre from the Colston plinth to where Colston’s statue was plunged into the Floating Harbour at Pero’s Bridge in June 2020. You experience the work by downloading the experience onto your smartphone and going to the Colston plinth. Here you put on headphones (or earbuds) and, after onboarding and background, you are set afloat on ‘a sea’ of interactive audio. As you wander around within this ‘sea’ along the historic Broad Quay fragments of facts, various statements, re-created dialogues, names of captains, slave trade statistics, lost voices, voices of resistance, whispers of the damned, mini-dramas (recorded from Hoyte’s script by professional voice artists) etc arise out of its depths and spiral in to you, set against a background of specially composed music (by Phill Phelps and Saki Yamada). Afloat or moored upon this ever-changing sea of sound are 9 audio ghost ships. These are the ghosts of real ships which set sail from HERE, from Bristol, from THIS very port more than 250 years ago bound for the coast of West Africa, and then on to the West Indies, trafficking enslaved Africans. Each ghost ship represents one facet of the trade in enslaved Africans and when you find one of these ghost ships you can ‘board’ it and listen in to what it has to say. You continue along Bristol city centre to the Cascade waterfall, then along the left-hand side of the water towards Pero’s Bridge. Crossing the bridge, you experience the work’s denouement – then it ends where the Colston statue was pitched into the muddy waters of the Bristol Floating Harbour – with, of course, a god-all-mighty SPLASH! Colston’s Last Journey also has a ‘portable’ iteration – you can roll out a version of the work over any statue of an enslaver or location of enslavement anywhere in the world you choose.
