About the exhibition
Vanishing Lines / Lignes de Fuite
Revisiting ideas of home, space, agency and freedom of movement – for the past few years I have set out to create different types of maps, cartographies of “the islands”, our Caribbean space. I am interested in the many layers which coexist, the messages written underneath and embedded in our Land-s and by extension – landscapes of the Global South.
What really happened here?
And who does that make us?
In this exhibition, an ongoing series – I am thinking about marronage within the context of Caribbean colonial History as a point of departure, while also reflecting on the decision and acts of marronnage in the present.
Marronnage (n): The escape of enslaved persons during the colonial era of the Caribbean, the Americas.
A Maroon/ Maroons/ Runaway-s (n): Africans who ran away from enslavement and forced labour on plantations, ruled by colonial powers and Empires of the North in the Caribbean, Americas and previously colonised countries. Runaways also known as maroons refer to all previously enslaved and indentured individuals who escaped the atrocities of the colonial plantation systems in a permanent way and who managed to reimagine, rebuild and re-create new existences for themselves in free independent settlements.
What are we running from?
How do we escape?
Where are we hiding?
Where are we running to?
How will we make it to the other side?
And, what do we create in our fugitive state, to help us heal, survive and thrive?
In light of increasing geopolitical crises around the world, increasing xenophobia, extremism, border politics, I started to reflect on the oppressive structures, violence and modes of violence, which all force us as humans, citizens, to seek escape at any given time.
To drop everything and run…
I see parallels between the world that humans have built during the anthropocene, and feel somehow that there are inherited systems of oppression, invasion, exploitation, violence, Land theft, extraction, injustice, discrimination… which continue to create precarious lives and uncertain futures for many, forcing individuals, entire families to abandon their native lands, to run far, to risk it all and find escape…
Vivre libre ou mourir.
Louis Delgres
The escape and escape routes so necessary – for survival, human dignity, joy, care, liberation, independence, space, time, love, freedom to dream and create alternative futures.
Our time here as human beings reminds us that so many of us are the direct descendants of our maroon ancestors. So many of us are not free and urgently need to escape.
So many of us are the runaways of our present time.
Maroon legacies and runaway stories for me are therefore experiences of migration, immigration and exile – chosen or forced – which simultaneously carry mappings of supernatural courage, resistance, rebellion, ingenuity and the wildest of dreamings…
