A Dialogue on Rapso - Past and Present

Friday 20/01/2012 / 3- 5pm /Alice Yard
Moderated by Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy


















This event is "a coming together of rapso artists (past and present) to have a dynamic conversation about significant moments and movements in the history of this genre. ."
- Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy

Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Dickinson College, where she teaches courses on the African Diaspora and the Caribbean. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarly work focuses on the intersections of performance, activism and identity politics in the Caribbean. Adding to material from interviews she has conducted with artists over the past 8 years, she hopes the event would offer a more dynamic conversation between artists and highlight significant moments and movements in the history of this genre. Those expected in attendance are Brother Resistance, 3Canal, Ataklan, Ozy Merrique, Gillian Moor, Sista Ava, Brother Book, and other members of the Rapso community.

Photo -Network Rapso Riddum Band Truck Banner, Emancipation Parade.

A conversation with Sasha Dees

Friday 2 December, 2011, at 7 pm

Sasha Dees is an independent curator and producer who lives and works between Amsterdam and New York. She has been a producer for numerous projects in all art disciplines and she was one of the pioneers in rebuilding the cultural exchange between the Netherlands and Suriname.

In addition to her own projects, in 2003 she and Philip Powel founded the not-for-profit organisation for the arts John106. Dees is also the co-developer and curator for the Open Ateliers Artist in Residence (OAZO-AIR) programme in Amsterdam.

In early December 2011, Dees will be based at Alice Yard on a short investigative residency, exploring the contemporary art scene in Port of Spain. On Friday 2 December, at 7 pm, she will give an informal talk at Alice Yard about her current projects and the OAZO-AIR programme.

All are invited.

“I dream to change the world”: celebrating the legacy of Martin Carter

Friday 14 October, 2011, from 7.00 to 9.00 pm


... if you see me
looking at your hands
listening when you speak
marching in your ranks
you must know
I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world.

The 30th West Indian Literature Conference, hosted by the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, from 13 to 15 October, 2011, borrows its theme from a poem by the late Guyanese writer Martin Carter: “I Dream to Change the World: Literature and Social Transformation”.

As part of the conference programme, on Friday 14 October, from 7.00 to 9.00 pm, the Bocas Lit Fest and Alice Yard will host an informal evening of readings and performances celebrating Carter’s intellectual and creative legacy. Scholar Gemma Robinson, Carter’s editor and biographer, will speak about his relevance for today’s Caribbean writers and artists, followed by readings by Nalo Hopkinson, Vahni Capildeo, and Barbara Jenkins. A performance by 3Canal will close the programme. Visual works by artists Marlon Griffth, James Cooper, and Rodell Warner will also be on view.

All are invited.

Charles Campbell- Actor/Transporter

ACT 5 - final action, reception & discussion
Sunday September 18th at 6pm - Alice Yard
( 4 - 5.30 pm - actual performance investigation - Wild Flower Park, P.O.S.)

Charles Campbell is among a new generation of contemporary Caribbean artists working to explore and disrupt the region’s dominant social narratives. He has exhibited widely in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, representing Jamaica in events such as the Havana
Biennial and the Brooklyn Museum’s Infinite Islands exhibition. His work uses images culled from the Caribbean's history of slavery and emancipation to investigate the intersection between meaning and image and open up the possibility of personal and social transformation. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College and currently lives and works in Canada.
His recent work has investigated and re-imagined the traditional Actor Boy character from the Jamaican Jonkonnu festival, a trickster figure and “agent of chaos and change.” Campbell writes: “Rather than remaining the character from Belisario’s print, a character from the past, I envision him as a character from one of the possible futures that was alive at the time of emancipation and a sort of embodiment of the coexistence of multiple futures.”

Looking at the Rational Utopianism of Buckminster Fuller as one of these multiple futures, Campbell has begun to create a series of three-dimensional spheres, drawing on Fuller’s geodesic domes: vehicles for the transport and circulation of people, ideas, and images, which “simultaneously excite different ways to understand something we see.” Campbell’s participation in ACT 5 is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Act 5 project statement here
See previous event pictures here & video
All are invited.

ACT 5: The Performative Moment

Opens Sunday 11 September, 2011, 5.30 to 8.00 pm



From the Helmet Series, by James Cooper


In September 2011, Alice Yard marks its fifth anniversary as an independent space for creative investigation, with a programme of events called ACT 5: The Performative Moment.

On Sunday 11 September, from 5.30 to 8 pm, Alice Yard hosts the opening of a show of live and documented actions by six artists: Ebony G. Patterson, Dhiradj Ramsamoedj, Charles Campbell, Hew Locke, James Cooper, and Marlon Griffith.

Actions in space and time operate at the juncture between remembered or conjured pasts and futures. Within this perpetual moment — remembered or recorded, privately or publicly enacted, never dependent on a fixed location or context — the contemporary, as an investigative visual enterprise, can be understood as more than just an inventory of cultural commodities or itinerant objects aspiring for visibility or institutional embraces. To many, this shifty and shifting lack of materiality is still seen as weakness when it comes to comparative or competitive questions of visibility and the historical record.

ACT 5 is simply a sequence in this ongoing process of transforming the value of our actions and the varied spaces in which we live and imagine. It is an alternative only to the way we may have forgotten aspects of our living past.

— Christopher Cozier

All are invited to attend the opening event and participate in this continuing dialogue. The ACT 5 installation can also be viewed on Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 September, from 5 to 7 pm, and by special arrangement. Contact helloaliceyard@gmail.com for more information.



Serpent of the Nile (2007), by Hew Locke, from the How Do You Want Me? series


Find out how you can support Alice Yard and ACT 5 here.