Tag: Caribbean

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Arts

Poetic Disorder: reflections on Caribbean life

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s exhibition reflects on the complex reality of Puerto Rico and adjacent communities in the aftermath of natural disasters, political disruption, and poetic disorder

Along with the excitement that comes from starting a new academic year, students also have reason to be excited about the reopening of Montreal’s cultural spaces. Excited as I was, I went to visit the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery’s newest exhibition, Poetic Disorder, the same morning it opened.

Presented in the context of MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, and within the theme of sensing nature, the exhibition by Puerto Rican artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz takes over the entire gallery with four video projects. The exhibition is curated by Stefanie Hessler, in collaboration with Camille Georgeson-Usher, Maude Johnson, and Himali Singh Soin.

Each work, realized between 2014 and 2019, displays different facets, stories, and glimpses of life in the tropics through the sensitive, activistic lens of Santiago Muñoz. From specificity in daily life, like taking a nap in a hammock, to imaginative narratives blurring fiction and documentary, Poetic Disorder reveals the rich, wide existence and perspective of Caribbean life. The audience is challenged to see the world and these communities beyond colonialism and western thought.

Binaural is the first installation I encountered. In the dark, while my eyes adjusted, I was welcomed by a symphony of analogue projectors, emitting beams of light displaying silent videos on a loop onto four separate panels. These videos displayed a vertical horizon, a person resting on a hammock, a flickering light in a tunnel, and a view into the jungle.

When I reached the fourth video, I realized that Binaural extended to the next room on my right, featuring two more projectors. As I watched the last videos, I reflected on the artist’s intention to alter the perspective and the standpoint of the camera, noticing how this drew me in as both a spectator and as a Caribbean individual.

None of the videos last more than three minutes. Nor do they reveal much context. However, the collective narrative of the six-channel 16mm film installation says a lot. It made me think about the use of analogue processes as a vehicle to decolonize the foreign gaze, and reflect on Indigenous practices around sustainability, collaboration, land protection, resistance, and care.

I later learned that Santiago Muñoz shot these videos in Puerto Rico and the Solomon Islands, where she used the local flora to extract chemicals in order to develop the films. Amazed by this, I admired the work once more, reflecting on the power of nature and our responsibility to preserve it.

Walking to the left of the gallery, I encountered familiar imagery and sounds. I put on headphones for La Cabeza Mató a Todos, a seven-minute HD video, and heard the croaks of the coquí frog, a distinct and recognizable part of the Caribbean soundscape. The piece features a woman, played by artist and activist Mapenzi Chibale Nonó, and a cat (voiced by Nonó) engaging in what sounds like some sort of dialogue or spell-casting to end “the war machine.” This eerie scene is based on a local myth about a shooting star, alluding to ritualistic practices in co-existence with decolonial, feminist, and queer practices.

On the other side of the wall, I encountered Marché Salomon. This 16-minute HD video shows a dialogue between two young workers, Marcelin and Mardochelene, at a market in Port-au-Prince. A philosophical and mystical dialogue is surrounded by chopping sounds, hip hop, and “old technology” that is accompanied by dynamic camera work and the occasional voice interrupting the video with instructions to pay attention and “look.”

Finally, I went to the last room to watch Gosila. The piece is a “16mm film and HD video transferred to video and projected through a piece of lighthouse fresnel lens.” This creates a magical refraction of colours, distorting the image into a curved rectangle, and acts as a subtle nod to the devastation left by hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017.

The following year was extremely difficult for Puerto Rico in every aspect, as it was left exposed politically, economically, and ecologically. By documenting the citizens and their small acts of care, reconstruction efforts, and the reclamation of their autonomy, the artist encourages us to think about the monsters we face both individually and as part of a community, and how to find light after the storm.

Before leaving the gallery, I was kindly greeted by the director of the gallery, Michèle Thériault, who conversed with me about Santiago Muñoz and her practice, sharing some afterthoughts about the curatorial experience.

After our conversation, I left the space with a lot to think and write about, confronting emotions of nostalgia and estrangement, with the motivation that, despite chaos, we shall find poetry in our everyday disorder.

Poetic Disorder is on display at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, located at 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W. on the ground floor of the J.W. McConnell Building until Oct. 16. 

 

Photo courtesy of María Escalona

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Arts

Seascape Poetics: a virtual exhibition

Connecting Caribbean stories through water

Curated by Bettina Pérez Martínez and assisted by Simone Cambridge, Seascape Poetics presents the work of six Caribbean artists who explore the complex connections of Caribbean relationships with water. The virtual exhibition is hosted by 4TH Space, a programming research space, and the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab, an experimental gallery at Concordia.

Caribbean artists Deborah Jack, Joiri Minaya, Lionel Cruet, Nadia Huggins, Olivia Mc Gilchrist, and Jeffrey Meris engage in a virtual environment to depict the relationship of water with colonization, slavery, exploitation, and Caribbean identities.

The Caribbean has a complicated past as the region was colonized. The ocean surrounds many islands and is a keeper of the many colonial histories that aren’t spoken about. Hurricanes, slavery, colonization, memory and many other themes are explored through the artists’ work concerning the ocean.

The artists also evoke a sense of nostalgia derived from being away from the main homeland due to environmental catastrophes, exploitation of resources, but also tourism which affects the local people of islands that are taken for granted for private interests.

As stated on the exhibition’s website, Seascape Poetics engages in a form of digital placemaking where the Caribbean and its diaspora exists temporarily in a shared archipelagic space.

When entering the exhibition, viewers are situated under palm trees near a wooden house, with the sea on the horizon. On the next page of the exhibition, the sound of waves crashing and the coquí, a small frog that inhabits Puerto Rico, can be heard, letting the viewer enter into an unfamiliar environment.

The exhibition is set at dawn and takes place in a tropical environment, but not the tropicalized environment that corporations have produced to sell the Caribbean. Instead, it is an uncrowded space near the sea, depicting different ecosystems that inhabit the many islands of the Caribbean, such as mangrove trees, a type of small tree that grows in coastal waters. As all of the artists have different backgrounds, they share a space where they can draw connections in an environment that resembles their homeland.

The public can navigate throughout the exhibition with 360 controls, meaning that viewers can click and drag on the background to have a look at their surroundings. Each artist has a page to showcase their work, accompanied by a description. There is also a play button at the right of each artwork title, enabling viewers to listen to a commentary by Martinez and Cambridge.

The first art piece presented is Drawn by water. (Sea) drawings in [3] acts, Act One: Wait(Weight) on the Water (2018) by Deborah Jack, an artist whose work revolves around video and sound installations, poetry and more. This video installation, which consists of scenes of sea shorelines filmed in Saint Martin and the Netherlands, looks at memory, colonial history and climate change. The video is black and white, erasing bright colours to avoid tropicalization.

The second artwork, Labadee (2017) by Dominican-American artist Joiri Minaya, is a video that draws parallels between colonization and tourism, and questions whether tourism is ethical. The video starts with a Columbus narration in contrast to the perspective of a Caribbean Royal cruise ship sailing in the same sea that Columbus once sailed. The video was filmed in Labadee, located on the northern coast of Haiti, a private beach rented by Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.,  an American cruise company. Minaya also draws attention to the impact cruise ships have on the ecosystem and the way it’s being damaged.

Moving forward, Puerto Rican artist Lionel Cruet’s Flood aftermath and other hurricane stories IV and V (2020) is a painting created on a blue tarp, the same blue tarp that was distributed to local Puerto Ricans by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover roofs that were destroyed by Hurricane Maria (2017). This artwork depicts the aftermath of the landscape after hurricanes by showing abandoned houses. Puerto Rico is still trying to recover from the event.

Then, viewers dive underwater where they can observe the work of Saint Vincent and Grenadines photographer Nadia Huggins’s Transformations No 1 (2014), depicting two images: to the left, a self-portrait of the artist underwater, her face covered in shadow and on the right, a sea urchin that emerges from the artist’s face. This artwork is significant as it draws connections between human life and marine life, where class, gender and social norms don’t exist.

Returning to the surface of the water, French-Jamaican artist Olivia Mc Gilchrist’s video installation Virtual ISLANDS (2019) shows a combination of lakes, rivers and oceans, creating ambiguity between land and water with the use of a circular lens that submerges viewers into a virtual world.

The exhibition ends with Haitian artist Jeffrey Meris’s Mouth to Mouth (2020) installation placed on the shoreline to honour overseas migrants. This artwork consists of fibreglass resin and plastic bottles sustained from a steel frame, creating an abstract version of lungs, including concepts such as breath, memory, and displacement.

The exhibition enables viewers the opportunity to understand realities that they may not be aware of, allowing them to have a better comprehension of the many stories that the Caribbean holds in its archipelagic area.

Seascape Poetics is available for viewing at https://seascapepoetics.com/ until Feb. 26.

 

Photo courtesy of 4TH Space.

Categories
Music

Keeping the beat locked down

It’s not every day that toe-tapping soca beats come emanating from Loyola’s The Hive, but that’s exactly what students who caught DJ Gordon “Gee” Weekes at the Loyola Luncheon heard on Jan. 25. What’s even more surprising is finding out that the DJ in question not only co-hosts a Caribbean music show on Saturdays at CJLO, but is also a coordinator of the security team for the Loyola campus.
At six feet tall with a quiet dignity and an easy smile, Gordon Weekes has a unique perspective on life at Concordia as he switches between his DJing gigs and campus security job with ease. He expresses himself with his hands and there is a glint of gold on his finger which he confides is a good luck charm—a ring that boasts a horseshoe with a tiny, carved horse head.
“Soca Man” by Baron (soca), “Cuban Pete” by Tito Puente (latin) and “Min Medikaman-an” by T-Vice (kompa) are just a few examples of the songs Weekes plays, but he prefers calypso because to him the words are imbued with comedy and double entendres even when the lyrics sometimes deal with heavier issues. Calypso is more of a “thinking man’s” music whereas with soca you can get away with the same words or a sentence being repeated along with the drum beats and not necessarily have the song transmit a message.
Weekes wasn’t always found around the Loyola campus. After spending 23 years in the military, he found himself out of a job. Luckily, back in 1925, a company called The Commissionaires was set up to help ex-soldiers find jobs and, coincidentally, Concordia hires security personnel from this company.
Over the past eight years, Weekes and his team of about five other guards canvas the Loyola campus, while another team of thirteen work at the downtown campus.
“I would love people to realize that the image of a big, fat guy sitting behind a desk doing nothing is not what it is nowadays,” Weekes admits, confronted by the idea of a stereotypical security guard.
The security personnel, some of whom are pursuing advanced degrees or using the job as a stepping stone to join the police force or the armed forces, are highly trained in CPR and other necessary procedures to ensure the safety of all students and staff.
“We need to learn about fire control, we have to take courses in hazmat [hazardous materials],” he explained. “There are lot of chemicals in the labs here at Loyola, so if there is a chemical spill we need to know how to contain that spill.”
While theft is one of the most common issues he faces day-to-day, he points out that “Loyola has a much calmer vibe and is more quiet compared to the downtown campus. The radio here is connected to downtown and those guys work very hard downtown, there’s something going on there every day,” he continued.
“The younger guys don’t like to work here because it’s too quiet,” he jokes. “They want to be transferred downtown where all the action is.”
When he’s not keeping up on the latest in soca for his weekly gig at CJLO, the volunteer DJ likes listening to jazz and blues and maintains a keen interest on student life. He once considered studying exercise science, and this year he is planning on taking French language courses.
With his job as a security guard and his particular interest in Caribbean music, Weekes has carved himself a unique niche here at Loyola.

Listen to Caribbean Callaloo with Gordon “Gee” Weekes and his co-hosts Raphael McKenzie and Pete Douglas every Saturday from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. on CJLO 1690 AM.

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