In the sound and video installation My Fathers Left Amber Ablett, a Black artist of Irish, Trinidadian and British heritage living in Norway, explores fatherhood from the perspective of children from the African diaspora. The work begins with the artist’s own exploration into how the narratives that British, Norwegian and Western societies have taught us about Black fatherhood shaped and warped the way she saw her relationship with her own father, and the ways in which colourism and internalized racism seep in. 

The collaborative research project takes the form of a sound and video installation that draws on a breadth and variety of experiences, and comprises a 5-channel poetic sonic essay, a video, and a mixtape played through a boombox. It weaves together tracks from Trinidadian and Caribbean calypso, soca and reggae, a British police show from the 1990s, storytelling and writings from W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and others. The work is installed in a wooden listening structure based on wooden stands used to hold up boats when they are brought onto dry land, thus connecting the personal stories to the stories of fathers that have travelled across seas. The project has included a series of workshops for BIPOC about the fears and vulnerability of storytelling (2023), as well as about poetic tactics for repeating, implanting and reclaiming our own stories (2024 with Touki, a Bergen-based Black arts collective). A prologue to the sound installation, which was co-written during the 2023 workshops, was presented at the opening Borealis Festival in 2023.