WRITING: The Potential of a New Direction, Clearer Intentions

Artist Statement version 4:

In the time that I have left in this life, I would like to chronicle the lives and experiences of diasporic people around the world. This would be through my lens as a post-colonial Afro Caribbean, using the frameworks proposed in postmodern feminist and queer cultural theory and the vocabulary of time based media; including sound, video, interactive, performance and installation work.

In this process I would present a counter narrative or the “minor tales” which combine the past, present and future, while challenging the hegemony of the “major voice”. Here, the mundane & the spectacle, the boring & the interesting, would be reflected in pieces, amplifying the unheard voices of people whose lives have long been abandoned; either due to the willful forgetfulness of trauma, or the systematic erasure of their existence in this society’s dominant narrative.

I am interested in making new fictionalized spaces where real history, contemporary reality and creative imaginings intersect to give us the opportunity to discover, accept, forgive, recognize and address the victor’s chronicles of society.  

With this methodology I first will want to present my observations of the African American experience, playing with ideas of time and manipulating perceptual constructs of self-consciousness, by specifically speaking to our diasporic ancestors on the mother continent, about the lasting trauma of the journey across the water to the new world. 

I want to present images of the daily frustrations, niggles and the constant mental fatigue of life in America. This overlaid with the personal stories of cultural trauma, systemic abuse, and the prolonged artificial misery, promulgated by the state, its elites and misguided masses. But these negative actualities would be contrasted with the successes, victories, celebrations, as well as the strength and tenacity that ultimately exemplify the extraordinary resilience and ultimate vindication of these survivors through talent, intelligence, creativity, courage, and grit that has been at the core of the African American identity, enabling this diaspora to continually overcome in the face of overwhelming negative odds.

In this work, I want to celebrate these tales which the major voice has ignored and downplayed. Using the freedoms granted by fiction, the poetry of images, and a re-imaging of history. I want to celebrate all of the ways in which people were transformed by encounters with and within this nation; their relationship with the land, its nature, each other, and other minor voices, bringing it all into their present selves.