THE MIDDLE PASSAGE PROJECT

the labyrinth: an expression of the unknown

The labyrinth is traditionally seen as a passive experience of the participants’ passage.  The spectator enters a situation without prior awareness of the absolute structure or design thus is freed from the immediate demands of the outside world. Entering the labyrinth and virtually in the dark, visual clues will be all but eliminated, other sensorial input will enhanced. Claustrophobic and disturbing, information gathered by the olfactory, tactile and audio senses become the conveyors of the experience. Because the ultimate organization of its numerous passages is unknown to the uninitiated, exiting the labyrinth is predicated on accumulation of information in time, which is the same as the Middle Passage, an experience of the unknown.

Historically, the labyrinth has been a symbol for happiness and of losing one’s self or the beauty of liberation. The concept of the labyrinth as a vehicle for spiritual freedom is deeply ingrained in the history of ideas. The notion of the labyrinth as a place of solace predates Romanticism, having existed as early as the mystery cults of Dionnysus. “The prisoner who survives incarceration or the rigors of the labyrinth,” writes Stephen Eisenman, “transcends bodily cares and is initiated into the realm of spiritual redemption.” Thus the labyrinth was seen as the setting for creative acts, a means, an escape “where time and the phenomenal world are placed in suspension.” The labyrinth form could perhaps be a metonym of the search for self for it demands a continuous wandering; a relinquishing of the knowledge of where one is a self-investigation.

Images of labyrinthine prisons and other spaces of confinement have sources in the history of art and architecture: the visionary architecture of Etienne Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and the Carceri inventzione of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The labyrinth exists as an instrument or sign of behavioral modification and in this situation stands for control by repressive conditions set by economic and class based hierarchies. Power insists that space be organized to monitor and control action. The slave trade needed this organization to function at its optimum The maze/labyrinth is a vivid and powerful vehicle for conveying the repressive experience of the unknown which was the Middle Passage.