[Extract] "In her installations, instead of providing a neutral platform for the viewer, Lindsay Seers’ exhibitions place the filmic imagery within the structures most appropriate to the narrative constructs. These structures are both factual and theatrical, thereby embodying the dual aspect of the evidence and the artefact. For It has to be this way², Seers has provided a structure that resembles the colonial slave fortresses of the Ghanaian coast. It is impossible for the viewer to enter this emotional landscape without making their own dentifications and associations, without being an implicated participant within the unfolding of history, its apparatuses and institutions as well as its human narratives. The personal and the collective, the factual and the fictional, are all but different features of the monstrous unfolding of the virtual event, a spectacle with no secure platform of observation."

Ole Hagen

Jacket text:

From a tangle of research notes, manuscripts and a fateful box of photographs, Lindsay Seers tries to make sense of her stepsister Christine Parkes’ strange behaviour following a moped accident in Rome. As the photographs in the box are deciphered through both an excess and lack of memory, the characters who interpret them move fluidly through interlocking histories. When Christine goes missing in 2001 amid a string of enigmatic events relating to Renaissance occult practices, Seers decides to re-stage a journey to West Africa made by Christine in 1996 after the death of her father. Travelling through Ghana in a colonial costume, Christine had unlocked the secret history of her father's involvement in diamond smuggling on the formerSwedish/Danish Gold Coast.

Somewhere between the unreliable, guilt-ridden recollections of a mother, the exaggerated memoirs of a mercenary uncle and the manipulative diaries of a man known only as S, Seers seeks answers to the mysterious fate of her mourned stepsister. Locked in a futile search for historical and photographic truth, the protagonists become prisoners of their own memories while the lens becomes a speculum producing truths rather than recording them.