A Living Room Surrounded by Salt

Working on Van Huis Uit in the Netherlands enabled a month-long artist residency where McMillan Instituto Buena Bista (IBB), The Center for Contemporary Curacao Art in Curacao, Dutch Antilles, 2008. Curacao has an oil refinery built on the site of a slave market at Asiento, and attracts migrant workers from across the region, like his mum before she came to England. As an installation A Living Room Surrounded by Salt was built under a dead tree using found and donated objects in the ‘Barrio’ (neighbourhood) of Buena Vista, a migrant area, where building materials can be stolen overnight. Through the local Women’s Church Association, McMillan interviewed women from St Vincent, Jamaica, Aruba, Anguilla, Montsterrat and Suriname, about their experience of living in Curacao, which became audio sound-bites heard from the installation. 

The installation was surrounded by donated concrete garden columns that were painted in the flag colours of the different migrant communities who because of work associated with oil refinery have settled in Curacao. There was also a line of salt surrounding in memory of the caustic sea salt mined by slaves on the island, who survived the ‘Middle Passage’ (the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were transported as part of the triangular slave trade) by conserving salt in their bodies. High rates of blood pressure hypertension experienced across the diaspora also reflects salt in Black life, illness and death. McMillan assumed the installation would remain intact for a day, but was apparently left undisturbed for two weeks, as local people believing it was a spiritual ritual, refused to cross the line of salt.