Linked Lives is a short film that project directors Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams co-produced with the National Gallery in London. This component of Colonial Networks developed out of a one-year creative collaboration with the museum and its NGX innovation program, and with the generous participation of American poet and performance studies scholar Madeleine Le Cesne.
Creative Collaboration with the National Gallery
The Linked Lives film is the product of an experimental collaboration in 2022-2023 with National Gallery curators, researchers, technologists, and media developers. The aim was to bring together our research on paintings in the National Gallery with museum expertise to explore new forms of storytelling around histories of slavery in French art.
The collaborative team who worked with us across the project included Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, Myojin-Nadar Associate Curator of Paintings 1600-1800; NG film makers Amber Akaunu and Alessandro Sorenti; Nicholas Smith, NG Archivist; Susanna Avery-Quash, Senior Research Curator; Siobhán Jolley, Howard and Robert Ahmanson Research Fellow; NGX team members, Oli Conner and Irum Ali; and Sean Cham, CDA PhD candidate from Birkbeck.
The collaboration involved a variety of creative workshops and agile sprints to experiment with digital possibilities for decolonial activities with the NG’s French paintings. Linked Lives was a culminating output from this collaboration, co-created and co-produced with Whitlum-Cooper, Akaunu, Sorenti, and Smith, along with poet Madeleine Le Cesne and the National Portrait Gallery’s Curator of 19th-Century Collections, Sarah Moulden. The film was released in October 2023 as part of the NG’s Black History Month programme.
These activities were supported by an HSS Collaboration and Strategic Impact grant from Queen Mary University of London.
The Story: Linking Two Portraits and a Poet
The story begins with the National Gallery’s portrait of the Comte de Vaudreuil, painted by François-Hubert Drouais in 1758. Vaudreuil is one of the Paris-based art collectors and Saint-Domingue plantation owners central to our Colonial Networks project. During the course of archival research into Vaudreuil’s plantations, we discovered a previously unknown connection to another portrait – Benjamin Haydon’s The Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 – hanging right next door at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
One of the delegates shown in Haydon’s portrait, which depicts members of London’s first antislavery society convention of 1840, was a mixed-race Jamaican merchant named Louis Celeste Lecesne. Lecesne grew up in Jamaica, but our archival research revealed a direct connection to Vaudreuil’s plantation in Haiti/Saint-Domingue, where Lecesne’s father was Vaudreuil’s white plantation manager, and his mother was an enslaved laborer of African descent named Charlotte. Tracing the complicated afterlives of Louis Celeste and his parents led us to a living descendant of the family, Madeleine Le Cesne, a poet and performance studies scholar from Louisiana, who agreed to collaborate with us on the creation of the film.
Making the Film
Linked Lives tells story of the connections between these paintings, the network of lives they represent, and the histories they embody. It unfolds from the perspective of Madeleine, who encounters her personal family connection in two London museums. The film is framed by an original poem that Madeleine composed in response to a dossier we compiled of the archival documents and objects we had traced in our research.
This film project was an attempt to bring new layers of meaning, complexity, and creative response to historical artworks that many museum vistors may find elitist, alienating, or irrelevant to their own lives and experiences. As Madeleine herself says in the film, when discussing her creative process of writing the poem, the goal was to both: “stay true to these historic facts, but also dream what else is possible around them.”
Intended from the outset as a film for digital spaces, Linked Lives, was launched in October 2023 for Black History Month on the National Gallery’s YouTube Channel. It was also re-cut in a variety of shortened forms for Instagram and TikTok (which features footage of Madeleine performing her poem), and it is embedded on its own page on the National Gallery’s website. Circulating in these digital spaces, the film has reached wide and diverse audiences, creating new moments of resonance and relevance for contemporary viewers of these historic artworks.
Other Links
- Read Madeleine’s original poem on the National Gallery website.