On The Map: April 2009

April 7, 2009

THE CONCERN FOR BECOMING UPDATED

The Caribbean and Central America on the Threshold on the Tenth Biennial
By Yudelsy Fundora Martínez

Curator José Manuel Noceda, from the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center , researcher and member of the International Association of Critics (AICA), valuates the most recent art of Central America, the Caribbean and the Canary Islands –a region he has been in charge of for the last two years– and comments on their presence at the Tenth Havana Biennial.

In your article “Sailing the Basin of the Contemporary Caribbean”, published in the electronic magazine Arteamérica , you state, based on the perception the world has of the Caribbean, that “(…) it is hard for the Caribbean to find its place among the shapes of the contemporary cultural map”. In what way does this phenomenon challenge the artistic creation of the region?

That article was written right after the Seventh Havana Biennial... keep reading

Still from 'On the Map' in conversation between Jose Manula Noceda and Yudelsy Fundora Martínez

April 1, 2009

At the Havana Biennial...

On the Map was selected by curator, Jose Manuel Noceda, to be in the Tenth Biennial of Havana, Cuba, March 27 - April 30 2009.

In Pavillion D, #22, the thirty minute video project, complete with Spanish subtitles is being continuously screened.

Also in the same space, Just Beyond My Imagination has been installed...providing a counter point to the video project.

Gratitude to Cultures France in Cuba, who provided financial support to make my participation possible.

My ten days in Cuba gave me the opportunity to see lots of work from approximately 300 artists from around the world, participating in both the Biennial and the Collateral projects in La Habana Vieja, Vedado and Centro Habana.

One of the highlighs was seeing Cuban artist Yoan Capote's piece - Open Mind. Approximately 15' square, this model of the brain as a maze like space to be realised as a park, worked beautifully in the space at Morro.

Yoan Capote - Open Mind

(Dinner at "Los Amigos", Vedado, with Cuban artist, Ibrahim Miranda, Curator - Tumleo Mosaka and Dutch based, Surinamese artist - Remy Jungermann)

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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

April 7, 2009

THE CONCERN FOR BECOMING UPDATED

April 1, 2009

At the Havana Biennial...

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Annalee Davis

Statement

Creole Chant

(complete text)

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