Epitaph
–
In 2010 the lesson was death.
I inherited the gift of ARC through death.
It emerged from ash, from the salt and body of life,
to find its own breath, colour and witness.
And now, it returns to ash.
Images and gifs courtesy Trinidadian artist, Rodell Warner. This piece of writing was performed at the Caribbean Digital VI Conference at Barnard College, Columbia in New York City in December 2019.
Birth + Manifestation
Our creativity emerged from mercury, from spirit, with the elements aligning to create an explicit life force defined by the essence of our will and intention. The collective urgency of humanity and of our individual journeys propelled us to go into our local and regional communities with a battle cry, with a purpose.
These communities were disrupted by trauma, fooled by some version western dominant/biased history which took us further away from our authentic selves. From our truths. Others were lost in the mire of being postcolonial subjects caught up with being in the service of others, rarely in service of self. What was the point of studying one’s expression, of honing in and focusing on one’s history and relevance if there was never an action to determine such value?
These communities which historically enacted matrilineal care–used at times to suppress and counter traumas–held important intuition and knowledge. Wisdom that we couldn’t see, and as women we struggled to figure out how to transform, how to rebirth our space, how to enact a kind of love worthy of discomfort and renewal.
And we were doing this without our fathers.
Blinded by grief, caught up in legacy.
The birth was a bellow. It happened in the midst of two howls: one a howl of loss, the other a howl signifying the emergence of something radical and new. We tried to reclaim the noise at birth, we tried to advance the energetics of that moment where the fire of an idea burns so bright that we saw a map of the Caribbean fold and twist upon itself. Islands collapsing into each other, hills and valleys making way for foreign and familiar encounters.
A time not so long ago, certainly our ancestors mapped these lands and waters, conquered water, earth, air and fire to know what was beyond the horizon. Certainly in our 21st Century comfort with our technologies and social networks we could also figure out a way to resist unknowing, to resist being strangers amongst each other.
Part of that attempt to transform and heal was ARC.
We used it to transmute creative inertia.
We used the fire of its intention to burn away our unknowing.
We used the choppy and hasty waters to clear our eyes from the wool.
We invoked its curiosity as a tool to connect with our communities and move beyond insecurities with ourselves.
We confronted patterns of neglect with study, intellect, intimacy and gusto.
And in it, we were proud.
In it we were afraid.
Naive.
We believed our projections of healing and cohering.
We became a colony of shivers with death in our peripheral vision, not running from it, but circling it.
Knowing that each day with it was a gift.
Knowing that for it to be the kind of bridge, access point and conduit we wanted, that the sacrifice would have to be large as we were trying to make the invisible, visible.
And it took shape.
A seldom expected flight in these parts.
As the words, images, stories, paper smells, textures, branding, web pages and experiences developed to share our subjectivities, histories, our radical nature, environs and creative acumen...it began to softly and gently bloom with its ear close to the ground and its heart wide open.
Finally, we could think about representation in formal and informal ways. About what it would mean if we could put these visuals into a shape built around resuscitation and sustenance of self, the sustenance of our spaces.
We could think about the possibility of knowing each other.
Of telling stories where we walked with the ancestors in resistance or ceremony.
Finally, we had a container to mitigate distance in a form that allowed for knowing even if the knowing was schizophrenic, phrenetic even if the knowing was self-conscious.
The knowing acknowledged affinities, our relations.
Within the knowing however, remained an unknowing.
A mistrust.
The stepping towards a liminal space not knowing how to fully manoeuvre. And for us, the steerers, we held a tenuous grasp on the threshold of its life.
Survival
It is now in retrospect interesting to think about the breadth of ARC, the growth and expansion of an entity and what it means for that freedom to be compromised because it could not find or sustain its own breath of life in its organic environment.
Even though ARC was a meaningful platform in its mission to cohere, transform and be a conduit for social/artistic advancement it was surprising to understand that its life was contingent on us giving it our collective exhalation.
In the Caribbean we are constantly at the crossroads moving between thoughts of defining the freedom for our creative projects...are they going to be co-opted, taken over or overturned by oppressive forces that undervalue the creative spirit or those that are fearful of a platform that allows for integration and truth-telling?
Sustainability at the very end near its dormancy was several moments of chaos: grant writing sessions in corrupt sanctioned spaces that automatically didn’t allow the type of life or work we required, meeting angel investors and entities that didn’t understand the value that we ascribed to our creativity. There was never a synchronous moment where the thing that was important to us, became important for them. There was always a dissonance/disconnect in the language and intention. We never found comfort in trying to argue for our value, when there was no need to argue as it was clear that there was no synchronicity between the creative endeavour and the systems that reinforces oppression and colonial constructs in the region.
The Afterlife
Now, we return to the ash, and the anxieties around death, not so much when things die a natural death, but when one has to consciously put a stop to something that once sustained life, an ecosystem, an environ. What does that action make us?
Some people viewed ARC’s stopping a failure.
I called it preservation.
Resistance against exhaustion and depletion.
For a long time after I held myself in shame. Sent by-the-way, non-committal, roundabout messages about its status.
And I learnt in the in-between time, that some things die a natural death and to surrender to that is a holy gift.
The pain and loss is now behind me.
ARC’s end wasn’t connected to failure but connected to possibility.
To offshoots.
To its splinter consciousness infiltrating something else.
In the end, afterlives are welcomed.
The afterlife is where things go to manifest.
To brew
To fall into companion with other kindred spirits, lives and deaths.
Rebirth
In this afterlife, we prepare for inevitable rebirth! The creative communities and the leaders of our informal art spaces have emerged slowly but surely. We have invented radical acts of love in partnership with allies near and far. From ARC’s umbrella, there have been countless creative actions and endeavours. There have been marriages, book deals, exhibitions, artist residencies, annual rendezvous, grants, intraregional collaborations, we began to un-Earth affinities.
In the afterlife, the memory of ARC is sustained as a beacon lit.
However nimble the flame, a flame it is.
