http://www.archivenotes.net/shift/

This site explores material found on the web about slavery (specifically North- American and West Indian) and re-configures this into a series of fragmented narratives. (more…)

From my notebook May ‘04 (Christopher Cozier)
Things that occurred to me while driving from Laventille over the Lady Young Road after visiting Che’s studio at CCA7.

Three Kings Tuesday

“So, wha’ it is he go come out with?”

“So, wha’ it is he go come out with?” is now a traditional, (or already anachronistic?) question around the idea of a “Tuesday” presentation. Derived from the conversations of Carnival past, the question demands a spectacle, one that may be beguiling, simply proceeding to dazzle the eye or one that intends to invoke thought and the prospect of transformation. Transformation from the ongoing devaluating processes of a not-so-recently-anymore “Independent” cable blitzed head-space.
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White Skin, Black Kin: a Postcolonial Exposé of (white) Female Creole Identity

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“In the Caribbean we are all performers … we all try to act out the roles that our skin reads out to us” (Benítez-Rojo 236). As Antonio Benítez-Rojo observes in The Repeating Island (1992), because of the colonial plantation system’s resettlement and reculturization of racially diverse populations through institutionalized transatlantic slavery, the postcolonial Caribbean is a site of multi-layered discourses where white guilt / contrition and black retribution plague racial identity’s conceptualization. (more…)

Permission To Mash Up The Space

by Christopher Laird

The Launch of Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC)

I was invited to attend the launch of an architectural firm, Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC) one evening early in May, I arrived to the sound of Ray Holman, Brian Perkins and friends, The Ray Holman Ensemble, playing high in the building unseen by the crowd gathering in the yard… the sound of the city? Drinks being served at a bar under the mango tree, little eats being passed around by confident little children. A bandstand was set up at the back framed on one side by an installation by Robert Young of The Cloth, a scaffolding draped with his trademark white cotton with appliquéd designs and on the other by Akazuru’s stuffed burlap shapes, ropes and strings, strung from the building’s gables to the ground like a ruin or a great tree hosting epiphytes. The traditional form of this St. Clair house at once facilitating and appropriated by the irrepressible spinning constructions of a textile Anancy. Dean Arlen’s red arrow sculptures hung overhead from the buttresses. (more…)