Family Connection

Family Connection has researched Black people present in historical popular culture in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. By centering these Black people the artist collective liberates them from historiographical marginalization. In their research in Estonia the focus was set on the figure of Saint Maurice and the literary character Eewar.

Saint Maurice was a Sudanese general in the Roman army who lived in the 3rd century and sacrificed himself to save strangers. A community of merchants that was active in Estonia, Latvia and Livonia from the 14th century until the Second World War seemingly paradoxically chose him as their patron saint. They named themselves the Blackheads Brotherhood.

Eewar was the leader of a Maroon community in Jamaica in Lydia Koidula’s book “Juudit or the Last Maroons of the Jamaica Island” (1870). This story is narrated through the eyes of the white plantation owner’s daughter Juudit who falls in love with Eewar and disappears with him at the end of the story. The collective brings Maurice and Eewar together but through them connects Estonian history with Jamaica, Tobago, Curaçao and Sudan. Through this Family Connection argues for solidarity, between oppressed communities connected by different forms of race and ethnicity-based oppression, that comes from recognition of each other and not consumption of each other. In Estonia their work also revives lessons about the operations of solidarity in pre-Soviet history.