Willoughby Lucas Hastings

The tour guide, like everyone else in the room, was white. She quickly stated that the adjacent sculpture was once on top of the plantation house but, for its preservation, had been relocated to the foyer. She didn’t mention the significance of the sculpture being a pineapple but implied that sculptures “like these” were a common characteristic of plantation architecture.

The pineapple became an indicator of wealth in sixteenth-century European society due to the cost of importing the fruit and for its popularity among the aristocracy. This connotation was carried over into the American South. As a result, sculptures of pineapples were placed atop plantations and fences, signaling the wealth of the landowner and inviting other wealthy, white travelers to visit the plantation. As such, the pineapple, retaining the same symbolic meaning today, began to represent this characteristically Southern hospitality.

The pineapple is only one of the many symbols that derive from lineages of settler colonialism and enslavement in the American South. They linger in the material and visual culture, historical archive, and artistic/academic production of Southern society aimed at maintaining ideological control. My work seeks to imagine the dissolution of these symbols and their governing ideologies through the use of ephemeral materials and performative manipulation and by juxtaposing aesthetics of colonialism with aesthetics of multiplicity.