1 hour performance, screen-printed text on t-shirt

Through a series of unannounced interventions, Libita runs the length of ‘Pero’s bridge’ back and forth continuously at speed until she can no more. Libita then moves into the adjacent Arnolfini gallery, and stands in front of projected moving-image works by Fujiko Nakaya.

Who Was Pero? Calls into question the movement histories, memorialisation and name changing practices of Bristol connected to the city’s central involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. The performance moves between protest and intervention, in response to Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Bridge (which drew thousands of people to Pero’s bridge) yet coverage about who Pero was, and the significance of the site — was all but absent.

The records state that Pero Jones arrived in Bristol in 1784, from a plantation in Nevis in the Caribbean, where he had been bought in 1765 by John Pinney along with his two siblings Sheeba and Nancy, when he was just twelve years old. After becoming separated from his family, Pero trained as a barber and was a house servant alongside the freed, formerly enslaved person Frances Coker. He remained enslaved for over 32 years, passing in 1798 without gaining his freedom at the assumed age of 45 years old. It is said that Pero became defiant and ill in his later years of life, after a trip back to Nevis with the Pinney’s. Before his death he was sent to Ashton in the country, for a change of air.

Read more about Pero’s Bridge here.