About The Guardian’s Hands Art Installation at Elsie Whiteley

Throughout the Summer we have been delighted to have the Art installation “The Guardian’s Hands” on display in our Atrium here at Elsie Whiteley Innovation Centre. It is a wonderful piece of Art made to highlight that Chocolate has a name. If you want to know more information about the installation you can find out below.

About The Artist: Adelle A’Asante

Adelle A’Asante, a lived-experience storyteller, hails from a long lineage of West African Griots. She focuses on the sacred art of storytelling as a tool for social change and justice. Adelle is an emerging visual artist in Calderdale, using her artistic practice to illuminate forgotten narratives of marginalized communities, aiming to foster empathy and inspire social transformation. 

Having recently completed the New Creatives Traineeship Program, she has been  commissioned to deliver the Chocolate Has A Name Festival as part of Calderdale’s Year of Culture. She aspires to grow as a visual artist, contributing to Halifax’s vibrant art landscape, and advocating for fair and sustainable practices in her project exploring cocoa as a pedagogy, an art medium, an embodied absence of the past, and as the Cocoa Artist.

About The Guardian’s Hands

The Guardian’s Hands is a collaborative work of Adelle A’Asante and the Tribe of Africaniwa, primarily composed of individuals with diverse lived and living experiences across the cocoa value web. The focal point of the installation is a larger-than-life representation of a cocoa farmer’s hands cradling a cocoa pod. The piece challenges the conventional notions of cocoa sustainability by prompting nuanced discussions around the health, wealth, and well-being of cocoa farmers, their families, communities and countries at large. A new story we call C2C: quite simply, a story of the cultivator through to the consumer because CHOCOLATE HAS A NAME!