The Colony

About

The islands were once amongst the most prized and contested places in the world. Colonised by huge numbers of seabirds, mountains of guano built up over centuries.  When its miraculous properties as a fertiliser became known in Europe and North America, the Great Guano Rush began.

Spain, Peru and Chile went to war over the islands. In 1856 the United States House of Congress passed the Guano Act, authorising US claims over uninhabited islands anywhere in the world. British merchants controlled the trade, using bonded Chinese labour working under brutal conditions. A mound of guano was displayed in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 alongside other agricultural advancements of the time. The Gibbs family built Tyntesfield Manor, a huge neo-Gothic pile in the west of England, on the profits of the guano trade.

The islands have not been permanently inhabited for more than a century, but the work of harvesting the guano still takes place every few years. Filming from different perspectives – a boat approaching the islands, drones circling above, and cameras on the ground – Lê’s three-screen film installation, accompanied by composer Daniel Kramer’s apocalyptic soundtrack, plunges the viewer into the bleak landscape, haunted by sequences of animation showing the ghosts of the Chinese workers in some of the abandoned buildings on the islands.

The presentation of Lê’s work is accompanied by photographs of the Chincha Islands, taken by the famous American Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner in 1865, and mid-nineteenth century maps of the Guano Islands.