Decolonising memory in Bristol: Dance and augmented reality as co-produced radical counter-memorial

The toppling of enslaver Edward Colston’s statue in the English former slave-trading port city of Bristol by Black Lives Matter protesters in June 2020 was a seismic event which sent shock waves around the world. It was, however, one action of many in a city that has for over thirty years been grappling with how to understand, acknowledge and commemorate its history of enslavement in public. Writing from a position of engaged memory activism, this article reflects on the collaborative public memory project Decolonising Memory: Digital Bodies in Movement. Working across academic, community, creative and digital arts sectors, the project sought to make a new meaningful intervention in Bristol’s long and contested public memory of transatlantic enslavement after Colston’s fall through an African-centred methodology. The project centred a radical decolonial praxis by using dance, movement and creativity as a method for researching different kinds of knowledge about past and present. Two major outputs of this work; a new memorial folk dance, and an augmented reality mobile phone app are here considered. This article argues that the project was radical in its conception as an African-centred anti-monumental act of counter-memory co-created ‘from below’, through alternative arts and performance-based memorialisation.