On The Map: Annalee to speak about her work at the Seminar Series in Theory and Criticism at Cave Hill

March 30, 2010

Annalee to speak about her work at the Seminar Series in Theory and Criticism at Cave Hill

Detail from "Just beyond my Imagination" - Floor mat engraved with text - 'Members Preferred'.

The next presentation in the series will be by Annalee Davis and will take place on Monday April 12 from 10.30 am to noon in the Computer Science, Maths and Physics Conference Room.

The title of her presentation is “Of People and Lands: Project 45 and Maps.” Here is her abstract:

Do visual artists have a part to play in contributing to an understanding of Caribbean societies? Can their creative investigations be seen as parallel forms of inquiry? This presentation contributes to the seminar series from the perspective of a visual artist working with installation, video, and wall-based work.

My visual presentation includes the sharing, in part, of two bodies of artistic works – Project 45 & Maps. Project 45 examines anxieties surrounding intra-Caribbean migration within the context of Article 45 of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. An evolving suite of forty-five inter-related pieces, Project 45 evolved out of a thirty-minute video project - On the Map, to continue examining issues of failed implementation, free movement, insularity, xenophobia, intolerance, racism, identity and human rights abuses in the Southern Caribbean.

The works are also informed by the Green Paper put forward by the government of Barbados in late 2009 - outlining the state's proposed changes to immigration law - suggestions which in spirit, contradict the commitment to the Revised Treaty, and which are designed to make it even more difficult for CARICOM non-nationals to improve their livelihoods through movement.

In Maps, I look at how the beauty of Barbados as a small island developing state is being irreversibly altered by the dominant vision of developers. Unprecedented modification to the physical environment is taking place - perpetuating the mythical image of tropical destination as playground for the tourist. Consequently, coastal access is increasingly limited to locals, while interior spaces are manicured into Miami look-alike 'community life style' arenas, showcasing cookie cutter houses planted around man made ponds, golf courses and polo fields. The island's best resources are shaped and reserved for external gaze and privilige for those from somewhere else. In one work, I measure seven miles of Barbados’ notorious ‘gold coast,’ to learn how many feet of beach access the public has left onto the west coast. Not much.

Annalee Davis is a visual artist who creates works in video, installation, drawing and painting. Her works explore ideas about home/land, longing and belonging and expose tensions within a larger context of a post-colonial history and more recent post-independent spaces.

All are welcome to attend.

Sincerely,
Richard L. W. Clarke

Homepage: www.rlwclarke.net
PhilWeb: Theoretical Resources Off- and On-Line: www.phillwebb.net
Shibboleths: a Journal of Comparative Theory: www.shibboleths.net
Encyclopedia of Theory: www.literary-theory.net

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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 30, 2010

Annalee to speak about her work at the Seminar Series in Theory and Criticism at Cave Hill

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Statement

Creole Chant

(complete text)

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