First Contact is an installation and media performance-in-progress. The basis of the piece is the 1759–1769 correspondence between Medford, Massachusetts slave trader Timothy Fitch and the captains who sailed his ships. These letters offer an opportunity to examine the irrevocable point of contact between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, and between British settlers and enslaved Africans, whose contact, collision, and conflict will eventually produce the ‘Americans’.

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