On The Map: ON THE MAP with Panel Session at Cave Hill Film Society

March 8, 2008

ON THE MAP with Panel Session at Cave Hill Film Society

The screening of ON THE MAP at the Cave Hill Film Society will be the first time that the video project will be presented with a panel session. Dr. Don Marshall, a social scientist from the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social & Economic Research, and the Director of Hit For Six, Alison Saunders-Franklin, have both agreed to participate as pannellists that evening. My plan is to make a brief introductory remark, show ON THE MAP, invite the pannellists to respond to the film and then engage with the audience in discussion about the film project. I see ON THE MAP as an open work which continues to evolve with each screening, response and discussion. My work as an artist continues to respond to the shifting social and political realities of the region.
Copies of the DVD will be available for sale at the screening. Hang out after the screening and have a drink and a chat with other film lovers on Friday, March 28th, beginning at 7.45pm at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination, UWI, Cave Hill, Barbados

2 comments:

Cybercíclope said...: Geee!! I would love to be there, Annalee! Please, keep me updated about it...

Love and peace

Omar; 3/19/2008 10:45 AM
Anonymous said...: Annalee,

Again I must congratulate you and ask that you indeed get funding to do the sequel. It is essential to keep knocking at these integration structured doors, so that they open.

Again some issues that are calling out to be dealt with are the following, and you may be best to tackle these inside of your 'creole construct':
* race and how people grow into stereotyping and xenophobia simply out of non communication.
*the rolling back of the 'one unified space' we created at tremendous cost in the world cup celebrations
*the wonder that is the Dutch, French, Spanish and English speaking Caribbean

cheers

I look forward to your next production and thank you again.

Michelle Cave; 3/29/2008 6:59 PM

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ORDER YOUR OWN COPY OF ON THE MAP

Email annalee@annaleedavis.com to order your copy of ON THE MAP.
We accept cheques or International postal orders included with your complete return mailing address and sent to Annalee Davis. Email Annalee for the mailing address.

You may also contact Annalee to schedule a screening at your school, university, artists' collective or gallery, community group, library, place of worship, private sector entity or government department. This can include a Panel Session which allows the issues raised by the film to be constructively discussed with the Director, invited Pannellists and the audience.

Statement

The Caribbean was the cradle of New World globalization. Our people all came from somewhere else, into the belly of the Americas.

Characterised by waves of migrant experience, the Caribbean became a place of confluence, transience and hybridity which for years romanticized the struggle to be whole, to become one Caribbean people. In spite of this ideal, we remain as fragmented as ever, locked into nationalist crevices, linguistic divides and exclusivist cultural legitimacy.

The repeated production of idyllic images of an eternal playground for tourists on the one hand, and notions of the region as fragmented, failed and chaotic on the other; mask a complex history, leaving Caribbeans ambivalent about a sense of self.

We must answer the question, both creatively and critically, what is the Caribbean? What image of ourselves do we wear and to what extent do these images represent who we actually are? What is the truth of our own lived realities and how do we speak to each other of this reality?

The challenge is to remove the mask created by the visitors’ gaze, to see through the rigid stereotypes, and to honestly reflect on our states of being.

My work exposes tensions within the larger context of a post-colonial history and the more recent experiences of post independence and 9/11. More personal explorations of home/land, longing and belonging, and creoleness, serve as cartographic meanderings of Caribbean space, and investigations of the self within that space; in an effort to discern the territory.

September 9 2007
St. George, Barbados

(complete text)

I am the complex Creole
My context is the Caribbean

An archipelago crocheted into a crossbreed
Of carnival, class and comess
Cognizant of Columbus
And the Commonwealth
That created these confused colonies
Correctly criticized for the callous treatment
Of the Amerindian
And the reconstitution
Of a Caribbean caste system

Several centuries later
My coronary artery crackles
When I think of the creatures
That created this cacophonous confusion

And although we collide
There is more chaos than community
Some feel like foreigners
As though uncharacteristic
Of these now ex-colonies
Our natural native islands

I celebrate the chorus of the Creole Chant

But I have a creed that I wear
Like a crest on my chest
My credentials are that I am created equally
Credible from my cranium to my coccyx

I cleave to no church, temple nor country
I sing the canticles
And practice a yoga
I chant
I breathe
I made my jappa and wrote a creed
I owned a crucifix
And acknowledge the crescent

I anoint myself with a communion of
Cinnamon, coffee and cumin
Cocoa, cotton and cane
It is with composure and compassion that
I conceive my compatriots as compatible
Whether Cuban or Guyanese,
Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Jew

I contemplate a Caribbean conservatory
That is a consanguineous conscious community
Confidently confirming a conglomerate
Who speak patois, Papiamento, Spanish and Creole

I celebrate the chorus of the Creole Chant

As a complex Creole
Confronting this crossroads of centuries
I cannot condone the corruption
Nor those who configure the conflict –
I outcast them from community

I contradict the unicursal way
And commemorate the cobweb we have become
I come to you
Not as a comedian
Nor as a clown
I come to you as a coalition
Of combustible matter
A civilized collective
Sometimes caustic, but never counterfeit
I am a cordless creator of culture
Conveying my codes
To a community that isn’t convinced
Of the credit of cultural producers

And now I wear coronet
A continuous circular

In my cipher
I chuckle
I weep

I celebrate the chorus of the Creole chant

March 8, 2008

ON THE MAP with Panel Session at Cave Hill Film Society

2 comments:

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Annalee Davis

Statement

Creole Chant

(complete text)

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