Danielle Dean

True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle)

In True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle), Danielle Dean uses archival documents to re-imagine colonial history from the 1400s, while also referencing her own personal history. Elmina Castle was built in Ghana in 1482 as a Portuguese trading post, and later became a key location in the Atlantic slave trade. Dean’s re-enactment is set in an affordable housing community in Houston, Texas, where her half-sister Ashstress Agwunobi lives, and who also performs the role of “the native.” Dean plays the role of “the prospector,” who plans to “colonize” her sister’s home by bringing a wobbly red cardboard castle into the grounds of the community and getting the locals to help build it and work there. Using iPhone recordings, split-screen, and reality-TV techniques, Dean re-enacts a historical narrative from 500-years ago, but also weaves in contemporary issues of gentrification, capitalism, racism, and her and her sister’s own identities into the story. Dean was born in the United States but raised in England, unlike Agwunobi who was born and raised in Houston. Watching the video, one might compare the two trajectories of the sisters. How might one’s geographical location and its colonial history change a person, if at all?