Joining host, Amanda Coulson, on The Blank Canvas tonight are Tessa Whitehead, curator of the upcoming show at The D’Aguilar Art Foundation, entitled “Diversions” and participating artists Melissa Alcena and Sofia Whitehead.
A Repository of Memories
All posts tagged: Double Dutch
“The Story of “ETA”: Blue/Green Ragged Island” Ideation in Art and Design
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Art and design, though they seem to make strange bedfellows, work hand in glove, and, along with literature, carve out space for exceptional spatial and design shifts that move people into new possibilities. The 2018 iteration of the annual regional collaborative project “Double Dutch” titled “Hot Water,” combines the work of Plastico Fantastico (PF) and Expo 2020 team from University of The Bahamas. The teams spent a week travelling to and from Ragged Island researching what it might look like to rebuild in stronger and more resilient ways in the wake of Hurricane Irma. The project combined students and faculty, as well as members from PF and we interviewed committee and community members and spent hours and then days creating and distilling ideas for the exhibition. What finally stands in the Ballroom of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) is weeks of contact and ideation, with that, a lot of experimentation to see how best to construct and meet new demands.
Murky Histories and Futures: “Digging Upward in the Sand” (2018) by Plastico Fantastico
By Natalie Willis. Forward, onward, digging upward in the sand, together. The 2018 “Double Dutch,” the 7th in the series of paired exhibitions, brings us questions on the future, on climate change, on what it means to govern a chain of 700 islands, and on what it means to lose an island’s culture from lack of infrastructure and intervention. “Digging Upward in the Sand” (2018) by the Plastico Fantastico Collective, stirs up these queries, worries, and troubling presents for us.
The art of connectivity: Sinking our roots further down.
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Caribbean peoples have cultural links and subterranean rhizomes–a mass of roots– that connect the region to a larger reality. This is also articulated by Cuban poets and theorists like Nicolas Guillen and Antonio Benítez-Rojo. The ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz argues about transculturation and harmonious combined with deeply conflicting existences. We often flatten culture out into its artistic expression, removing any life from it; putting it in a museum and extracting its marrow. We thereby tend to fossilise and remove understanding of culture and its unique link to the place, time and people. So, Guillen, Ortiz and Glissant came up with understandings of culture that transcend limited material understanding. We also remove the multiplicity of experiences and histories from culture because so much of history and culture is limited to the official version as told by the coloniser.
The Art of Living in the Tropics, Part Three: Silence
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Culture is the art of living in a place that speaks of experiences, adaptation and resilience. Culture is the unique expression of spatial and temporal identity or vice versa where a people perform life based on their history and geography. As people are increasingly marginalised through the expansion of capitalist desire into the tropics, the art of living there shifts from a national or an indigenous-peoples-based art to art of magazines and design. How do these things meet so that peoples and their cultures can thrive alongside gated out-sourced post-nationalist communities?
Double Dutch “Hot Water” Opens!: Climate change, Ragged Island and vulnerable ecologies explored.
By Holly Bynoe. The “Double Dutch” series supports the concept of bringing together local and regional artists, irrespective of where they are currently residing, to work with a group of ideas personal, political and otherwise crucial to the development of a contemporary Bahamian identity. These artists and collectives are often divided linguistically and geographically but are united by common historical, economic or practice-based conditions. For this reason, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) pilot project attempts to create and maintain ties throughout the Caribbean and its more extensive diaspora.
The art of living in the tropics. Part II: Hand come, hand go
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Exuma blue recedes into Ragged Island sargasso and green. Sole inhabitant of Buena Vista Cay, Edward Lockhart, a reminder of Hemingway’s Old Man and The Sea (1952) has pulled up alongside and tied his boat to the MV Captain C and now stands with the others on the deck. Sun pounds down as the heat of living in the tropics feels much hotter than it has in forever. Art is always somewhat less strange than life, as stories come and go and fight to retain their place in a global village quickly being overtaken by overwriting of colour-blindness and leadership that throws women and minorities and their voices under the bus. Ironically, there is this romantic notion about “going back to the island”, it will all be better there, by and by. The irony is that hidden in this discourse of nostalgia for the island, is an erasure of the same island we long for.
Rebirth: Field Notes on Loss and Belonging
By Ethan Knowles: Summer Intern for Expo2020 for the upcoming Double Dutch, “Hot Water”. It took three days before Aunty Mary decided to stay. To stay, not merely till the next mailboat, but for the next month. This revelation came as a great shock not just to the enduring community, all of whom had seen my aunty pack her bags and run off to Nassau the second Pa Elmer turned a blind eye, but to Pa Elmer himself, my grandpa and guardian, who had never known his daughter to show a sense of attachment to this tiny rock at the foot of the Great Bahama Bank in all his life.
The art of living in the tropics: An art of survival?
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett. The University of The Bahamas. The savagery of hurricanes is clear as people struggle to recover and survive. This is the first of a three-part series that journeys through and to the Southern Bahamas, to Ragged Island. It is an exploration of connectivity, innovation and cultural erasure meeting with opportunity, though not for all. As a part of the content for The Bahamas pavilion at the Expo 2020 “Connecting Minds Creating the Future”, to be held in Dubai United Arab Emirates beginning on 20th October 2020, a group of researchers sought to collect data and stories of life in the tropics. The focus will be revealed as the stories unfold. With the theme of sustainability, the question becomes: can any of us be truly sustainable in a cultural reality that threatens erasure through natural and man-made situations?
Aftermath: Field Notes on Loss and Belonging
Ethan Knowles, Guest Intern for the Double Dutch 2018 Project. When I first came back home I was afraid. Though the hurricane was long over, and the news said that all the rotting carcasses had been cleared away, I was afraid nonetheless. I was afraid because I barely recognized anything. Riding around in Aunty Mary’s two-seater truck, I couldn’t spot the crowds of red mangrove that would ordinarily welcome me home after so many hours spent on the mailboat. Instead, I saw angry, misshapen skeletons tearing at the shore. I didn’t see Uncle Freddy or Ma Pat working the salt flats either. In fact, I didn’t see anyone down there – just flooded pans and brooding boundary lines. I turned away to gaze at the sea. I scanned the horizon carefully, but there wasn’t a boat in sight; and when I spun around to survey the land, I couldn’t make out a single child’s mother gathering tops in the bush.