Mi waan go a country go look mango” stems from Coakley’s  long-term research of colonial plant life, particularly that of the Caribbean. A series of related works at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery exhibited concurrently, in response to the Dutch Flower Paintings exhibition on tour from the National Gallery. Both bodies of sculptural work investigate the intricacies of colonisation and Black identity. “Mi waan go a country go look mango” consists of the body of research which has informed the Horticultural Appropriation and Dutch Flowers projects, providing a space to open-up accesibility, allowing the viewer to map and make their associations through the information and works.

As plant specimens were removed from their tropical surroundings, so too were their associated knowledges. Mi waan go a country go look mango, taken from Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s dub poem ‘Riddym Ravings’, attempts to reassemble some of these knowledges on the one hand while challenging Eurocentric categorisations and archiving conventions on the other.

The project is a collective effort that brings into the fold new elements and collaboration with Otis Mensah, with a new spoken word piece. Together, the range of processes unpick the charged narratives of horticultural lives by asking ‘how, as Black people, do we relate to [our] landscape when Empire and Colonisation are so closely linked with the land we now live in?’

A Living and Healed Peoples collaboration With Otis Mensah.