“Bonche” is a public intervention in the one of the most popular bus routes in Havana-the P4. With transportation being one of the key problems in Cuba the “guaguas”, buses, are notoriously crowded, uncomfortable and unreliable. They are spaces that belong to everyday life where various elements of a society converge creating a roaming microcosm. However, the strange intimacy created by bodies being pressed together reminded me of another public space-one of a party, concert or carnival. I was attracted to the hedonism inherent in “una fiesta” and the contrast that it provokes in a society characterized by enduring hardship.

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I always thought that everyone is the same

If each human being is an individual with a complete network of senses of his own and a special combination of abilities, then the vision of each human being will be different, and the way in which each individual determines his life will be a unique interpretation. Captured in the complexity of civilization, man often loses sight of his human destination. The artist not only records the physical data of his own being, but has to act as an interpreter, a translator of human experience. Art functions as diagnosis, definition, and standard for human life.
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The Worldviews of the Amerindians of Cairi and of Medieval Europe

by John Stollmeyer

Warao Cosmology, Mythic Eco

In my researches I have come across some interesting correspondences relating to Trinidad and its perceived importance to different peoples.

In the Karinya language the word Arima means, “place of beginnings.”
The name for Naparima Hill comes from Nabarima, which means, “Father of the waves” to the Warao who inhabit the Orinoco Delta. It is the abode of the spirit of Haburi, their ancestral hero, the original canoe and paddle maker. Perceived as a petrified tree, it holds up the northern limit of their universe.
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Installation and video collaboration between Christopher Cozier & Richard Fung.

A-Space Toronto

Curated by Andrea Fatona ( Jan 2004)

The Work of Art in an Age of Neocolonial Production

Aaron Kamugisha

Though they often do not realize it, the West Indians of today cannot afford to go on regarding this region as a tropical estate to be exploited for its economic returns. Whether they like it or not, this is their home. So, we need to face the problems of making the West Indies a more acceptable physical and social environment for ourselves and those who may come after us. Even now, we often have only the vaguest understanding of the true nature of our present ambiguous situation.

Elsa Goveia, Past History and Present Planning in the West Indies (1966)

While delivering the inaugural Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture at Warwick University in October 1991, Stuart Hall made the point that “one of the perplexities of the independence movement certainly in the British Caribbean islands is that … in the early phases of those movements so-called political independence from the colonial power occurred, but the cultural revolution of identity did not.” This apt comment strikes at the heart of the Caribbean post-colonial condition, and questions our periodisation of this era as one of ‘independence’, ‘neocolonial times’, or a ‘postcolonial’ epoch. In what follows, I hope to locate the artwork of Christopher Cozier within a larger problematic – which can be described as the crisis of postcolonial citizenship and identity in the contemporary Caribbean.

Aaron Kamugisha

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Random Notes - Cadboro Bay: Index to an Incomplete History

Statement by Melinda Mollineaux with a response from Andrea Fatona

The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual past.

Stuart Hall

On that day all the coloured business houses would close up shop and everyone would go in carts or on horseback to Cadboro Bay where whole sheep would be roasted on spits on the beach.

James Pilton

Examining the colonial histories of Canada’s West Coast black settlers I learned that, from the time of their 1858 arrival from California, this community held annual Emancipation Day Picnics every August 1st at Cadboro Bay. The picnics represent for me a diasporic social space and enactment of history counter to official narratives of Victoria’s British colonial “History”. Like the picnics, I use photography to say that despite a certain amount of invisibility, our experience of a life in migration occurs within a sense of place.
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Enmasillada de la Serie Mutantes

MUTANTES

Raquel Paiewonsky

Desde hace anos he estado trabajando casi obsesivamente con el cuerpo humano e investigando la relación de este no solo con su entorno, acciones y las diversas energías que le afectan sino también con su lenguaje síquico y emocional. Me interesa plantear como todos estos factores convergen, y se proyectan a través de nuestro cuerpo. Este proyecto presenta una serie de entidades biológicas ultra humanas suspendidas individualmente pero que habitan en un espacio común. Estos seres mutantes animados por su diversidad de miembros y materia fueron cosidos a mano en una acción minuciosa y casi meditativa.

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The Specimens from Local Ephemera

Nicole Awai

Red Room Limbo

In 2001, I started physically mapping out a psychological landscape that originated in my then red wall bedroom. The word ‘mapping’ is essential here because subconsciously, I began to chart a course to Local Ephemera.

Local Ephemera is the world of in-between. It is a liminal terrain governed by the sensual and the intuitive where concepts, ideas, inferences and innuendoes (ecological, economical, political and art /historical) take on physical form and are constantly in flux. Things seem to be constantly shifting – displacing, evolving - replacing, oozing – relocating.

The residents of L.E. are a peculiar amalgam of contemporary and historical artifacts from our world that when annexed together seem to create a revolving commentary on our social dynamics.

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Double Vision – Optical & Cognitive Meanings & Mythology

Charles Campbell

wall graphic detail

Although I assert strongly that art can be spoken about and that words do play a part in illuminating art works I am never the less uncomfortable when asked to speak or write about my own work. Partially it is the obtuse and hyperbolic language of contemporary criticism that I have never managed to feel at home with, but more importantly I am uncomfortable with the authority my words are assumed to have over my images.

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Proverb

198, London

video still

In Proverb, his first solo exhibition in London, young Trinidadian artist Mario Lewis presents an installation meditating on the diasporan experience, commenting on ‘migration, history and belonging,’ and what he calls a ‘hybrid film’ explores ‘the passing of time, estrangement, [and] alienation as a poetic construct.’

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