Dispels Current Political Overtones in the Caribbean
By Melina Paris, Contributing Writer
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA has come to a close with its more than 70 exhibitions throughout Los Angeles County, but one of the initiatives major exhibitions, Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago remains on view through March 4, at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.
PST: LA/LA, the far reaching and ambitious Getty-led project explores the intersection of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles. Relational Undercurrents, curated by Tatiana Flores, is one of the largest museum surveys of contemporary art from the Caribbean to date. It is presented in four thematic sections: Conceptual Mappings, Perpetual Horizons, Landscape Ecologies and Representational Acts, featuring more than 80 artists. The exhibition includes painting, installation art, sculpture, photography, video and performance.
Flores recently spoke about Relational Undercurrents and her approach in curating the exhibition. She noted the Caribbean has always been written and studied about from the approach of different linguistic traditions or colonial traditions.
“I wanted to try to find the relationships between the different islands, even when artists and cultural producers weren’t aware that they existed,” Flores said. “That’s where this idea of the undercurrents comes in.”
There is an expectation that Latin America is made up of the Spanish speaking countries of the region. However, Flores advocates for the stories of the Caribbean to be told within a Latin American framework because the (Caribbean) exclusion doesn’t sit right. Her intent is to tell a story of the Caribbean that feels unified, but also to question the conceptual boundaries of Latin America as being very much about continents. She wanted to point out the particularities of island experience that don’t fit into a continental narrative.
Flores said that something else she reacted to is that the Caribbean is often positioned as an African diaspora narrative, which is very much the case for the islands, but in the continental countries there are still huge indigenous communities.
“When you position the Caribbean almost as a diasporas base, as a blank slate, as this place where they brought the African slaves, you also ignore a huge population,” Flores said. “So, Suriname, Amazon, Panama, all the Caribbean coasts that are continental have indigenous peoples.”
Flores wrote a book about 1920s Mexican art, Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes. Because of her extensive knowledge about indigenous cultures and how they are represented in art she is sensitive to the representation of indigenous peoples and was troubled by their exclusion from a Caribbean narrative.
Flores chose to delineate a map of the Caribbean based on an island experience because of the near-extinction of the indigenous peoples and their cultures on the islands. She recalled a famous quote from Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, about how on the islands the black slaves became the natives. Fanon was also a writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism.
This is one of the main themes of connection between the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Another theme Flores worked with is that the islands are in themselves a diaspora space where people from many different regions of the world came together, whether by choice or involuntarily.
Flores mentioned Andil Gosine’s performance in Representational Acts. It makes reference to the settlers from the Indian subcontinent who came as indentured servants, which was in itself almost a kind of slavery. In Trinidad, where Gosine is originally from, a little more than half the population is South Asian Indian. That is why Flores did not only focus on the artists who inhabit the islands, but also looks at artists from diaspora spaces. She wants to make clear that the issue of migration is both a historical condition and an ongoing phenomenon.
The overshadowing of indigenous people both through colonialism and exploitation of the people, land and the resources they provide compares to colonialism in the United States with the first nation’s people. But the nationalism we see today in the United States and in some European countries is completely different from the narrative of nationalism and colonialism in the historical dialogue of the Caribbean.
Flores describes Caribbean nationalism as an act of emancipation and an assertion of the right to exist whereas European and U.S. nationalism is inherently xenophobic and imagines a community with no diversity and no history.
With the attack and restriction to access on knowledge in this Trump era, Flores hopes that people come away from the exhibition with a greater sense of the complexity of hemispheric geographies and relations and of how the histories of these places are intertwined.
Trump famously referred to Haiti as a “shithole” country, but the roots of Haitian poverty and the conditions which afflict it are born of colonialism, and later, U.S. intervention. While Trump demands that people take responsibility for the conditions of their economic and infrastructural hardship (also in the case of Puerto Rico, whose inhabitants are U.S. citizens and were insulted by his comments post-hurricane Maria), the situation is far more complicated given the history of colonialism and ongoing colonial relations that exist among practically all the islands and their colonizers/neo-colonizers.
Flores noted this exhibition was a deliberate choice around PST. Having the generous funding and research that the Getty provided made it possible to do an exhibition that she believes would have been very difficult to pull off or might have taken 10 years in fundraising.
“Because these countries that are very difficult to find financial support and philanthropy, nothing could ever equal from a single source what the Getty gave, Flores said. “I don’t think you could even have that kind of ambition starting out if it hadn’t been for something like PST.”
Details: www.molaa.org