Draconian Switch 17!

This issue of Switch includes writing by Dave O. Williams, Marsha Pearce, Mariel Brown and Andre Bagoo, and considers the work of architect Colin Laird, reviews the film Doubles with Slight Pepper, ponders the new art book Pictures from Paradise and ruminates on Caribbean Cautionary Tales.


READ it here.

A note on notebooks

Somehow they conspired to get together.

In truth, they were meant for each other.

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READ MORE  from a field note by me on the relationship between my poetry and journalism just posted at the amazing Exit Strata website here.

Special delivery

APT (ed. Nicholas Laughlin)
All I Can Say Is What I Can Say / What I Can Say Is All I Can Say (by Nicholas Laughlin)

Neither Here Nor There (by Alicia Milne)
Pinky & Emigrante (by Alicia Milne and Luis Vasquez La Roche)

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THAT morning, I was not expecting it. An A4 envelope addressed to me: too large to be a bill or a simple letter, too small to be one of those unaddressed spam magazines. The return address is written in a familiar but not immediately recognisable handwriting (how little we see each other's handwriting in these days of emails, blogs, Facebook!) I do the usual hold up to the light and check test to ascertain if anything explosive is inside, then carefully open it. A small note:

APT is a found journal. Its form is its content and its content is its form.  

The October 2011 issue of APT is made of pages torn more or less at random from a 2009-2010 Trinidad and Tobago telephone directory.  

It is titled REPUBLIC.                

                                               Nicholas Laughlin, editor

Inside the envelope are seven, non-consecutive, pages from the telephone directory, folded into a booklet form with a stapled spine. APT is stamped near the top right-hand corner, a date and issue number, stamped beneath: 01 // October 2011. The pages seemed ripped, neatly but in a way that, for me, brings attention to the violence required to rip a page out of a book. The numbers on one page were persons with the surname George, beginning with George-Hutchinson Sybil 648-4155.

This feels like receiving an intriguing puzzle. And all over I seek out and think I find clues. APT, anagram for TAP, PAT. REPUBLIC is in bold, as is APT. Could this be more than just a stylistic touch? Combine the words and play around. Hundreds of words emerge between them including possibilities like: blur, clip, cut, club, ripe. The ripped pages of the directory bring attention to the feel and texture of things: they are light yet oddly heavy. The pages are the most functional thing you can imagine and are not meant as art but if you LOOK at them you seek out how they are ordered: the lines of text; the seeming juxtaposition of strangers. The entire exercise is sensory: a reminder to look, see, feel, smell, think. This is a fine example of the kind of thing that is happening in what is an increasing trend in Trinidad: excitingly strange art is coming in the mail.

It's not really surprising. Decades after oil and gas booms, the State has demonstrated that it has no real concern with art or spaces for it. Art is used, but not preserved. Into this there are new spaces emerging. Some are taking things - literally - into their own hands. Art has gone private, underground. One off-shoot: mail as art.

The idea of mail as art is a world-wide development given that the postal services are not as frequently used today as they once were. We are now a little bit crazy over e-cards, emails, online chat and video, social networks, blogs and comment forums. Forms to apply for things are online, transactions are downloaded and uploaded. Of course there are some things that still come in the mail: bills, formal letters and bank statements (though increasingly you can opt out of these). So when something as simple as a letter or a note comes in the mail, it is almost a thrill.

Laughlin, an administrator of Alice Yard and editor of the Caribbean Review of Books, knows a thing or two about finding new spaces and the thrill of correspondence. The theme is a key concern in his poetry and a natural extension of TOWN the literary journal. A few weeks after APT arrives there is another envelop waiting for me in the mail. Smaller, with a bit of scotch-tape securing its contents. Two small items are inside.

The items are two cadmium blue postcards. One reads: "ALL I CAN SAY IS WHAT I CAN SAY" ; another "WHAT I CAN SAY IS ALL I CAN SAY". The text is in white in a sans serif font. On the reverse of one card is that familiar handwriting from before: "AND SOME DAYS I SEEM TO HAVE NOTHING AT ALL TO SAY. -" The other card, a simple signature and date: "N. 3 Dec. 2011."

A few months later, more. From a different source.

A white envelop with a stark black font. The letters P & E and my name and address. Inside a small booklet, one side Emigrante the other Pinky. Three flyers to post on walls as I please. This is the work of Alicia Milne and Luis Vasquez La Roche who have mailed out, in a personalised kind of way, zines. (I have written a blurb for this project.)

More clues: "We place our work in the streets and curate encounters with the public. Existing in the landscape, the work no longer belongs to its creators, it becomes art for all," a notice reads. Then, images playing on ideas of HE v. SHE, part and whole, pleasure and pain, screaming and silence. Physical education (PE) comes to mind: play. Both are artists who produce work interrogating self and what it means to place the self across the boundaries letters normally transgress.

Exploring Milne's website, I encounter her zine Neither Here Nor There. The artist mails out a copy to whoever emails her asking for it.

A few days later, it arrives in the smallest of envelops. Inside are words, maps and drawings of fictional and real places. I can decipher the following phrases throughout the zine: to somewhere; Point A Point B Point C Point D Point E; no scale available, dark-ness, the constant flow; Pass through time; the clusters descend, scale variable; a fraidy place is always uncertain; sometimes north, sometimes south; nice, nicer; straight straight straight straight; and still I feel uncertain.

Where the self is; the idea of travel and of order; of mapping the terrain; of moving between motions, states, emotions. Somehow all of this comes to mind. It's the kind of thing possible with art that comes in the mail. There is so much more of it out there, too.

Water most closely resembles space

Photo courtesy Letizia Gramaglia

ANACONDA

Water most closely resembles space,
more so than our hard imagining
of ideal nothings; water, sure as snakes
are steady, pouring over every sit-
uation

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Trinidadian Poet Vahni Capildeo reads 'Anaconda' from Undraining Sea (2009) in this amazing new pod-cast at Spaces Between Words. She also reads from Utter, another completed book, and gives insight to her process of writing.

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VAHNI CAPILDEO:

When people say things like, 'what does this poem mean?' or 'how can you summarise this line?' I think well what is the point of writing a poem rather than writing a report? Because I want to be able to evoke contradictions and produce what could be called cognitive dissonance which, I think, is a very natural state and also sometimes to be able to grasp certain truths which are not, perhaps, theorisable.

I mean obviously I am not a physicist but I think there are certain truths about the simultaneous perception of time and memories, like the memory of a migrant, that can be apprehended poetically in a certain way beyond what can be described in a scientific report.

I think what I do is I try to be very aware all the time of the rhythm of people's voices; of sense stimuli; of  bigger implications like political implications underlying what someone is saying personally: so the matrix in which people say things or in which people act. I would try to think myself into other people's heads, almost like finding out what particular music moves that person. And, also, a kinda of thick description to the environment in which anything happens. I am conscious, for example here, of talking in a very blue and green room and I better go back and write about this: blue and green things will start to emerge in my head.

So after a lot of very vigorous and vivid experience of living and then disciplined reading (and also pleasurable reading) I'd grow an interior journey. I look without compromise at what is coming up in my mind. It's like a thread has exercised my mind and what kind of dance is it going to do. And if my mind presents me with a sequence of images, I might interrogate it; ask where do these come from. But not really why are they there. The question why is for the revision process. I put down the truth of what my mind presents when it is made to focus very quietly.

Maybe part of the reason literature is there is to remind us that we don't have to take a tool-kit and come up with a solution, but you need to keep on trying and trying and marvelling. Maybe it is the humility of marvelling.

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LISTEN TO MORE HERE.

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from DARK AND UNACCUSTOMED WORDS

http://www.eggboxpublishing.com/pdf/dark_and_unaccustomed_words.pdf

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from UNDRAINING SEA

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from NO TRAVELLER RETURNS

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Of renewal

FIND out more here

Unknown runner

By Chris Ofili for the 2012 Olympics. 

FIND out more, including a video by Tracy Assing about it, at ARC here.

La Busqueda

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

Medulla Art Gallery is pleased to invite you to
The Search – La Busqueda
an exhibition of drawings by Luis Vasquez La Roche

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday 14th June 2012,  6.30pm – 9.00pm
at 37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain. RSVP 740 7597/medullaartgallery@gmail.com

ARTIST TALK: Thursday 05th July, 6.30pm – 9.00pm
Exhibition continues until Monday 09th July 2012

ABOUT THE SHOW:
The use of different drawing mediums, from charcoal to graphite, reflects a transition in my concepts. The charcoal drawings explore a more emotional and confusing beginning of my search. The drawings with graphite on paper are more contained and logical, almost mathematical. Even though the figures seem to be geometrically accurate and proportioned, slight variations and adjustments have been made to make the drawing imperfect. These drawings explore more in depth questions like: which nationality represents me? which race do I feel more identified with? which culture I am most influenced by? And what are the traits of this new culture that I wish to adopt? Luis Vasquez La Roche 2012

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Luis Vasquez La Roche was born in 1983 in Caracas, Venezuela. He moved to Trinidad and Tobago in 2002. He later studied Visual Arts at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. He has participated in a several group shows including Erotic Art Week in Trinidad, 2010, Mensajes Positivos in Chile, 2011, PFC (pon una foto en la calle) in Venezuela, 2012, and special guest as P&E (Pinky and Emgrante) at Woma in Grenada, 2012. He has also been part of urban art projects including P&E, 2011, Who Am I?, 2012 and Urban Heartbeat, 2012.

Calabash 2012: jubilation

Novelist Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and The Thing Around Your Neck (stories) reads on Friday 25, May, at Treasure Beach in front of a packed crowd. (Photo by Andre Bagoo)

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The more literary festivals there are in the Caribbean the better and Calabash attracts a devoted, enthusiastic (and large) following, amid the stunning backdrop of Treasure Beach. 

The festival itself was dedicated to Jamaica's 50th Anniversary of Independence. Like the recently concluded Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad, the programme featured a wide range of talent from the Caribbean, the diaspora and all over the world. Readers included Adiche, Jamaican writer and poet Olive Senior, Orlando Patterson, Victor Lavalle and many more.

I also managed to catch excellent readings from several poets including: Jacqueline Bishop; Loretta Collins; Christine Craig; Fred D'Aguiar; Shara McCallum; Anis Mojgani; Claudia Rankine; and Kevin Young.

Olive Senior (far right), author of Dancing Lessons; Kerry Young (Pao), Sadie Jones (The Uninvited Guests) and Melissa Jones (Emily Hudson) (left) pose for photographers after reading on Saturday at Treasure Beach.

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The sun sets on Treasure Beach on the last day of the festival as poet Loretta Collins Klobah hands over the original script of The Harder They Come to Perry Henzell's family.

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PHOTOS BY ANDRE BAGOO. 

SEE + READ more here. CHECK the Calabash website here.

Seductions of text and object

May 25, 2012, Medulla Art Gallery, Fitt Street, Woodbrook, in collaboration with ARC magazine.

As the name, “Interpretations’ implies the gathering will focus on various perspectives of Thomas-Girvan’s work through a critical, exacting and nurturing framework. Personal connections to her studio practice will be explored along with the various seductions of text and object. The presenters will engage with re-readings of Thomas-Girvan’s work from a literary, philosophical, art historical and liminal perspective. The event will showcase new works by visual artists Jaime Lee Loy and Michelle Isava.

Speakers for the night include writer and scholar Gabrielle Hezekiah, whose work centers on philosophy, visual art and theories of the moving image, short story writer Sharon Millar, co-editor of Robert & Christopher Publishers and Art Director of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival Melanie Archer, artist and Rhodes Trust Fellow, Marsha Pearce, and Barbadian contemporary artist, educator and cultural activist Annalee Davis.

FIND out more here. READ a review of Jasmine Thomas Girvan's Gardening in the Tropics here.

Pictures from paradise

Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of Contemporary Caribbean Photography
(Robert & Christopher Publishers, ISBN: 978-976-95344-7-6, pp.222)

IN THEIR introduction, editors Melanie Archer and Mariel Brown make clear their intentions.

“Pictures from Paradise seeks to examine the ways in which contemporary art photography has evolved within the English-speaking Caribbean, rising beyond idyllic scenes to tackle more intricate issues,” they state.

“Within the past few years, regional artists working with the medium of fine art photography have provided us with an increasingly searching image of the Caribbean and the people who inhabit it. In recognising that the region is not the picture-perfect paradise of traditional depictions, these artists focus instead on what is not easily seen or that which is often ignored – the complex social, racial, political and physical relationships and landscapes that exist within the Caribbean.”

This is a book many have been waiting for. It succeeds — spectacularly — in not only showcasing the work of established and newer artists, but also in going beyond the old clichés of what photography from “the tropics” is thought to be about: building a far more complex picture which makes us stop and think about history and about some of the issues we deal with on a daily basis. Indeed, as the editors suggest, these pictures aim to photograph that which we cannot see or do not wish to see.

READ full review at Newsday here.

A mosaic

What is Caribbean art?: why we need art history, a discussion at the 2012 Bocas Lit Fest

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WHO AND what is art for? Is art meant to be seen or experienced? Who is the intended audience? Do artists make work just for the sake of the work; for themselves or for others? Do artists create for a country or a region or an even broader audience? Do they imagine their work speaking to others, speaking after death?

We have to pose these questions when we address another: what is the importance of preserving Caribbean art? (And, by the way, what is Caribbean art?)

A special panel discussion put on at the recent Bocas Lit Fest  at the Old Fire Station Building in Port of Spain addressed the question of the need for art history. The panel, chaired by editor Nicholas Laughlin, included co-author of Art in the Caribbean, Anne Walmsley, artist Christopher Cozier, art teacher Andy Jacob, and cultural studies lecturer Marsha Pearce.

Walmsley spoke about the process of putting together Art in the Caribbean: An Introduction, which she co-authored with artist Stanley Greaves.

"The book is an attempt at chronicling the region's art," she said. "But it is not art history as art history is practicised today. It is a chance to look at work in different ways. I tried to find out more about the artists and their backgrounds. I found there was very little published material at the time." The idea behind the book was to be a kind of gallery or showcase.

"We would have a collection of images in a gallery in a book of reproductions with text alongside each: a visual anthology," she said. "We were very aware that it must be a regional book. It had to be regional. I was aware that we just did not know enough about art in the region. The Caribbean is--to use Christopher Cozier's phrase--an imaginary space. The work is all made here, even though some of the artists work abroad." With so much ground to cover, however, there were challenges.

"The actual selection was incredibly difficult," Walmsley said. "We had to pick work of quality that would repay close study." And work which was also in a form available for publication.

Pearce argued that the book presents a multi-faceted view, like looking through the lense of an insect's "compound eye".

"What you get is a mosaic," she said. "There is not only one lens. I feel that this book attempts that kind of mosaic." At a recap of the discussion published at art magazine ARC's website, she calls for, "a compound way of seeing the Caribbean in relation to artistic practice."

Christopher Cozier, Anne Walmsley and Nicholas Laughlin. Photo by Andre Bagoo.

"A compound eye is that which is made up of many, separate visual receptors.," Pearce writes. "Each receptor has its own lens and each lens catches its own image. A compound eye gives rise to a mosaic image. The more lenses the compound eye has, the higher the resolution or detail of the mosaic image. This compound way of seeing is critical for a space like the Caribbean, which we cannot hope to see and understand with one lens or in a stereoscopic way. Lenses are required in Curacao, St Vincent, Haiti; lenses must be focused in each of the various islands and anywhere else Caribbean people may find themselves: in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, in Brooklyn, in Melbourne. The mosaic image is a re-membering of the various lenses. A compound way of seeing can give us a higher resolution image of what a category, which we might call Caribbean art, looks like." Laughlin also noted that, "No single book is ever definitive."

There was discussion on the possibilities of the internet as providing a digital archive and the differences between seeing work in person, on the printed page and online. Cozier suggests that the internet opens up possibilities and takes on a life of its own.

"All artists are very concerned about the context of how their work is conveyed," he said. "The internet has changed everything. It allows all kinds of secondary genres: it becomes a parallel reality to the physical world." Pearce suggests that web archives address the inaccessibility of regional art.

"There is a glaring invisibility of art-work in the region for students. Students were not aware of art beyond Trinidad and Tobago. There is a need for students to know." Jacob saw no difference between the internet as a medium and printed forms.

"The difference between books and the internet is not that significant," he argued. "I don't think there is anything that is inherently different from the internet and the printed page."

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SEE more here. Art in the Caribbean (New Beacon Books, 2010)

Risk

ARC magazine and Rodell Warner are up to some magic. SEE more here.

Photos from the launch of Trick Vessels at Bocas Lit Fest

Andre Bagoo, Vahni Capildeo and Nicholas Laughlin, Bocas Lit Fest programme director.

Photo by Rodell Warner. SEE more photos here.

Unforgettable moments from the Bocas Lit Fest

Photo by Rodell Warner

DESPITE the carefully planned build-up, the Bocas Lit Fest still came upon me like a thief in the night. But how happy I am it did! For four days, all of my senses were overwhelmed by riches. The programme had breath, depth and variety and managed to not be dominated by any one single event or person. I was left listless at the end of it: wanting, remembering, thinking and looking forward to more festivals to come. Here is a list of some of my favourite events in random order.

Audience at the Old Fire Station Building

Music ‘From the Old Yard’

One of the most enjoyable highlights this literary festival (and there was an embarrassment of riches), was the premiere of a new piece of music, The Old Yard: Carnival Portraits from Trinidad, composed by Adam Walters, for strings, wind and percussion. The performance, at the UTT Academy for the Performing Arts, featured poems by Muhammad Muwakil and images by the great photographer Maria Nunes. This was a stunning event: the music balanced the meshing of separate themes with an artfully deployed dissonance. The tone was sombre, but not melancholic: the inverse of the exuberance of the music of Carnival. This was a risk which, in my view, worked. The energy and danger of Carnival met with its beauty; there was shade and subversion and understated joy. The final movement was a spectacular battle between two themes, with one subterranean theme gradually, and quite majestically, overwhelming the other. The presence of poetry and the filmic qualities of the slideshow created questions and unexpected relationships. Is poetry not music? Are images poems? Is film both?

Celebrating the 2012 winners

The day after the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize announcement ceremony (a report on which you can find here) the prize-winning writers all read from their work. Novelist Earl Lovelace read a section full of comedy and pathos from Is Just A Movie; Loretta Collins Klobah read from her multi-lingual The Twelve Foot Neon Woman and Godfrey Smith read from his biography George Price: A Life Revealed. The prize having been announced the night before, all of the readers were relaxed and gave fine readings. This was a treat.

Kei Miller and Sharon Leach

Poetry readings!

There were excellent readings from poets all over the region, writing in different styles, including: Kendel Hippolyte, Lasana Sekou, Vladimir Lucien, Fawzia Kane, Nicolette Bethel, Lelawatee Manoo-Rahming, Vahni Capildeo*, Kei Miller, Mervyn Morris, Fred D’Aguiar, Shara McCallum.  The scope and variety made me wonder if poetry is beginning to have an even greater impact on the region’s sense of its literature. Or is it a constant stream through which the region finds expression?

Kendel Hippolyte

Writers also gave remarkable readings including: Sharon Leach, Erna Brodbar, Karen Lord, Rahul Bhattacharya, Joseph O’Neill, Monique Roffey, Rivka Galchen. There were also readings from new writers: Stephen Narain; Sharon Millar (whose piece provoked a strong discussion on the sense of “place” within the work of Caribbean writers) and Rhoda Bharath. One issue both writers and poets discussed in one event was the question of influence and how dangerous the idea of mapping them out can become.

Artist Christopher Cozier, editor Anne Walmsley, and Nicholas Laughlin, Bocas programme director

Pictures from Paradise

Without a doubt Pictures from Paradise is an important book and will go some way to putting photography and the work of photographers/digital artists in its rightful place: the spotlight. The launch event was a buzz of activity.

One day after the book launch there was a reading of poets and writers at Martin’s, a pub/bar in Woodbrook. The energy on the night was palpable and the night was unforgettable because of the hilarious readings from several including Merle Hodge, Earl Lovelace, Colin Robinson and Mervyn Morris.

Midnight robber showdown

The Bookman and Midnight Robbers

The festival featured art from Wendy Nanan’s recent show at Medulla Art Gallery, ‘Books and Stupas’. The show was based on the figure of the Bookman and several pieces found themselves at strategic points all over NALIS. You can read a review here.

By coincidence, the programme featured a Midnight Robber showdown with the likes of Kurtis Gross, Fedon Honore, Johnny Stollmeyer, and Bill Trotman. The robber-talk came alongside some heated discussions throughout the festival, many of which revolved around set themes. One example was the discussion on “What is Caribbean art?: why we need art history.”

There was so much more, more than any list can enumerate. What can be said, though, is that the festival is a vital part of creating room for more dialogue about our region, its writing and its art.

Vahni Capildeo reads EM Roach at Martin's

*who read with me, but more on that here.

A kind of mesmerism

LH: Can you sum up Trick Vessels in three words?

AB:  DREAM    COME    TRUE

LH: Do you like to perform your poetry? Have you done so?

AB: I’ll tell you a secret: I actually enjoy reading my poetry. But I love reading other people’s poems more: I feel like I am channelling them in a kind of mesmerism. I have read at Alice Yard and poetry events here and there. On 28^th April, I am going to launch Trick Vessels at the Bocas Lit Fest in a reading alongside the great poet Vahni Capildeo. I cannot wait!

From an interview at ARC. READ more here.