Still from Speak Robert 2017. All rights reserved.Did you recently walk by an East India Company shop in London? Were you confused? Indifferent? Disturbed? Did you feel you had travelled back to the imperial era? You shouldn’t be. Sit back, relax and take a sip of imperial nostalgia with a fine cup of English tea. Everything is for sale. Even the East India Company. Even in 2005. In fact, that was when Indian entrepreneur Sanjiv Mehta bought the company, including the right to use the name and the trademark of the coat of arms.
London-based artist Laura Malacart was intrigued by this case and started digging through some historical archives to connect the entrepreneurial history of the East India with its present day reincarnation. This research formed the basis of her interactive installation ‘I am Robert’ shown in the Tate Modern as part of the 2017 Tate Exchange ‘Who Are We?’ programme. Triggered by the East India Company’s rebirth, she decided to follow in the footsteps of Robert Fortune, the Scottish botanist who was tasked with stealing China’s precious tea plants for transport to India. Laura’s journey instead set to explore how history has impacted on the here and now, as she inhabits one of the most capitalist cities in the world, London. In a nutshell, her answer to the question of who we are is that economic forces are the overriding factor in the creation of identity: identities are created through consumption.
Some might want to believe that an Indian businessman now buying the East India Company is a final victory over empire.
