100 Years after Independence (Not Ours)

A conversation with Tatiana Flores

Tuesday 28 August, 7.00 pm

Zapatistas at Rest, by Fernando Leal (1922, oil on canvas)


Tatiana Flores, Alice Yard’s current researcher in residence, is an art historian and curator, based at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She specialises in twentieth-century Latin American art and contemporary art. Her first book project examines the development of avant-gardism in post-revolutionary Mexico, in relation to the Estridentista (“Stridentist”) movement, which encompassed art and literature. She is also active as an independent curator, and was co-curator with Christopher Cozier of the 2011 exhibition Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions (Washington, DC).

On Tuesday 28 August, Flores will give an informal talk at Alice Yard on the development of modernism in Mexico, one century after independence and immediately following the Mexican Revolution. It ponders the place of the arts in a postcolonial and socially agitated context, and offers a creative revisioning of the period typically known as the “Mexican Renaissance.” In her conversation with the audience, Flores will consider parallels with circumstances in post-independence Trinidad and Tobago.

All are invited.

A public intervention by Estridentistas in Xalapa, c. 1926: car parked on the steps of the city cathedral

GPS / A conversation with Carlos Garrido Castellano

Tuesday 21 August, 7.00 pm

From Cosas del Corazón, by Pascal Meccariello

GPS: Video Art from the Caribbean is a series of seven video works curated by Carlos Garrido Castellano and Dagmary Olívar Graterol, first shown in Madrid in March 2012, as part of the International Congress on the Caribbean.

The curators write:

“... a GPS is a system that helps us to locate directions, spaces, and, in that way, to place ourselves spatially. Elaborated with the most advanced technology by international enterprises, a GPS seems to be the ideal tool to measure the increase of mobility and connectivity in the present moment. But a GPS is not infallible. Its accuracy depends on so many factors: the person who listens, the position of the satellites, an updated model, and some local adjustments made by local governments in order to elaborate cartographies of small, otherwise inaccessible spaces.

“From that position, GPS intends to approach the visual creativity of the region by showing the work of seven artists who share an interest in questioning the position of the self and the society in a changing context ....”

GPS will be shown at Alice Yard for one evening, on Tuesday 21 August, and Garrido Castellano will lead an informal conversation about questions such as:

= How “responsibility” can be articulated from the present perspective, and how can it be linked to a expanding, changing context.
= How to measure initiatives developed by artists concerning their relations with the public and institutions across the Caribbean.
= How ideas of place and diaspora have been changed by the inclusion of digital technology in the artistic process.

All are invited to join the conversation.

Carlos Garrido Castellano is an art historian specialising in Latin American and Caribbean art, and an assistant professor at the University of Granada in Spain. He has done long-term research stays in countries like India, Jamaica, Serbia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Martinique, and Puerto Rico, and he is the author of the book Arte en Diálogo: Conversaciones sobre práctica artística contemporánea, identidad e integración cultural en República Dominicana. He is currently researcher in residence at Alice Yard.

From Let’s Punish Your Body, by Lázaro Saavedra

Artists included in GPS:

= Joëlle Ferly (Guadeloupe), A MazeD, The Strange Fruit
= María Elvira Dieppa (Colombia), Waiting Room
= Pascal Meccariello (Dominican Republic), Cosas del Corazón
= Sheena Rose (Barbados), Town
= Lázaro Saavedra (Cuba), Let’s Punish Your Body
= Argelia Bravo (Venezuela), Biografías encubierta
= María Teresa Díaz Nerio (Dominican Republic), Homenaje a Sara Bartman

A conversation with Marta Fernandez Campa

Wednesday 8 August, 7.00 pm

Marta Fernandez Campa is a scholar based at the University of Miami. She is currently visiting Alice Yard on a research residency. On Wednesday evening she will give an informal talk on aspects of her recent work. She writes:

“I will be discussing the possibilities that Caribbean visual arts and literature offer for addressing more alternative and personal forms of memory, looking at work from visual artist Christopher Cozier and poet M. NourbeSe Philip. I am interested in how their work investigates, challenges, and stretches the boundaries of what archiving means and entails in Caribbean contemporary arts practice and expression.”

All are invited.

A conversation with Mariamma Kambon

Friday, August 3rd, 6.30pm

Olatunji, 2011

Mariamma Kambon will discuss her ongoing series of photographs entitled " Black Power's Inheritence" - a series that examines " the repercussions of the Black Power Movement of the 1970s in Trinidad and Tobago, on the progeny of its leaders... it offers a participant observer's perspective on the cross generational impact of the movement"