Junkanoo Processional
Junkanoo Processional
Essays and in-depth interviews by Digital Junkanoo masqueraders with artists alongside, creative writing, literature, photo essays, and portfolios.
Managing Editor: Tatyana Tandapolie
: a book containing litanies and hymns for use in religious processions, especially at the beginning of a service.
: a musical composition (such as a hymn) designed for a procession
: a ceremonial procession
Un/cementing Jamaica’s Architecture of Colonialism: Visual Artist Camille Chedda’s Blueprints
Reconstructing the materiality of many of the country’s buildings, Afro-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist Camille Chedda’s work asks viewers to confront the remnants of colonialism splintering Jamaica’s national identity.
The first installation of “Views” was on display in Kassel, Germany, from June 18 to Sept. 25, 2022, as part of “documenta fifteen,” an international contemporary art exhibition that takes place every five years. Photo credit: Demar Brackenridge.
While walking along a winding stretch of beach in the coastal town of Arbroath, Scotland, Jamaican artist Camille Chedda found and photographed a trail of red, clay bricks dotting the shoreline. The bricks, worn and weathered, were washed up from the tides of the North Sea, the company names etched on their faces — “Glenboig” and “Forth and Thistle” — the only clue as to their origins.
After researching the corporations, Chedda learned that Forth and Thistle’s bricks had been used to construct the distilleries at Appleton Estate in Jamaica, a sugar plantation in the parish Chedda was raised in, St. Elizabeth.
The discovery prompted the multidisciplinary artist to turn to her sketchbook. She reimagined her 2015 sketches that depicted women embracing the concrete building blocks used in many Caribbean nations’ structures with the bricks in their place. Her drawings grew from questions sparked by the leftover environmental destruction she witnessed in Haiti in 2015 and the viral dancehall trend in Jamaica of women bashing cement blocks against their crotches.
“The women that I would draw, they were holding the bricks, and I was thinking about the relationship between the women with the concrete blocks, women with the bricks and the destruction of both,” she said of the 2017 sketches.“The bricks’ destruction was a kind of colonial destruction and perhaps those cement blocks were the same, too.”
The sketches inspired Chedda’s work to take on a new motif: the architecture of Jamaica’s plantation houses, known as Great Houses, and estates. From her 2020 “Untitled” and 2021 collage, “...We all live under the same sky” to 2022’s “Views,” she repurposed the concrete blocks as frames for images of the houses, landscapes and artifacts of Jamaica’s colonial past.
Chedda revisited the themes of much of her previous work, interrogating the construction, fragmentation and destruction of Jamaican identity in a self-proclaimed post-colonial society through her exploration of the properties’ transformations. Her cinder-block art seeks to unveil the remnants of colonial history hidden beneath the nation’s “no problem” attitude and tourism industry, calling viewers to confront the past in the images and videos filling her creations’ spaces.
“Work like ‘Views,’ it might just be talking about Rose Hall, but it’s actually bigger picture,” she said of another plantation estate. “If we accept Rose Hall as this Annie Palmer, fairytale situation where it's okay for this white woman to have owned slaves but she’s a celebrated figure — If that happens there, then what are we doing in our daily lives? We don't appreciate the fact that there's this dark history.”
Minding the Horrors
Out of the few plantation houses and estates still standing after the 1831 Christmas Rebellion, an eleven-day uprising carried out by nearly 60,000 enslaved Afro-Jamaicans, the Rose Hall Great House is the island's most renowned.
St. James planter George Ash began its construction in 1750, possibly naming the edifice after his wife Rosa. But her fourth husband, John Palmer, completed the Jamaican-Georgian mansion in 1780, outfitting it with 365 windows, 52 doors and 12 windows. After the Palmers died in the mid-to-late 18th century, John’s nephew and his wife, Annie, assumed ownership of the estate.
Annie Palmer ruled over Rose Hall as a harrowing enslaver, committing a number of atrocities against the hundreds of enslaved Africans forced to labor on the property. She gained notoriety in Jamaican folklore for brutally murdering three of her husbands, taking enslaved African men as lovers and disposing of them as she saw fit, and ultimately dying by one such lover’s hand. The gruesome legend of her cruelty and fate, believed to have originated from John Costello’s 1868 pamphlet, “Legend of Rose Hall,” dubbed her the “White Witch of Rose Hall.”
This warm-toned illustration of towering white, gates opening toward the distant Rose Hall Great House was published in 1825 in James Hakewill’s “A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, From Drawings Made in the Years 1820 and 1821,” in which the English architect documented and described an array of edifices and monuments on the island at the time.
In 1820, English architect James Hakewill estimated the estate, then adjoined with nearby land, spanned approximately 2,000-acres with around 200 devoted to grass fields, 250 to wilderness and another 200 to sugar cane fields. The Great House fell into disrepair over the course of the century but was purchased and restored by American entrepreneur John Rollins in the 1960s.
The now 7,000-acre estate is a bustling Montego Bay-area tourist attraction and historic site. Today, the property boasts two, nearly 7,000-yard golf courses, seven wedding and event spaces, thousands of acres of residential and commercial real estate, the restored Rose Hall Great House and the nearby Cinnamon Hill Great House that was once home to American musician Johnny Cash. Rose Hall is open to visitors for daily historical tours and nightly ghost tours, the former of which is also available as part of a $130 USD bundle called “Annee’s Escape.”
Never mind the horrors that took place in its dungeon — renovated into a bar serving “Witches Brew” cocktails — or the bear trap formerly used to ensnare enslaved Africans who dared to flee on display in its interior. The alleged presence of enslaver and murderer Annie Palmer’s ghost is, in part, what most attracts guests to the property, according to its website.
Chedda challenged the estate’s transformed image in her 2022 installation “Views,” which swapped her usual cement blocks with their “conceptual extension” in wood. She fit transparent images of Rose Hall’s manicured golf courses, plantation estates, coconut trees and sugar plantations into the windows of the blocks and suspended them from the ceiling with thin wire.
Hanging at eye-level, the piece, according to her artist statement, forced viewers to confront these distortions of Jamaica’s cultural heritage intended to shroud histories of African enslavement and displacement for the benefit of tourism.
“View, 2,” the second iteration of Chedda’s “Views” was on display at the December 2022 installment of the “…and I resumed the struggle” exhibition series. The wooden blocks hung from the ceiling, forcing viewers to engage them. Photo credit: Kevaughn Beckford.
An Identity in Fragments
The controversies surrounding Rose Hall came to the forefront in 2019 when Jamaica’s Miss Universe contestant donned a glamorous, appliqued gown and crystal-encrusted headdress portraying the White Witch of Rose Hall.
Some Jamaicans decried the costume for presenting an enslaver as a symbol of national pride, while others praised it for showcasing a lesser known part of the culture before a global stage. For Chedda, the display and following debate laid the foundation for “Views,” serving as a reminder of what she considers the fragmentary identity of the island nation.
Chedda’s “Views” fits images of Rose Hall’s manicured golf courses, plantation estates, coconut trees and sugar plantations into the windows of the blocks, turning the metaphor for construction into a frame. Photo credit: Demar Brackenridge.
“When I say it's fragmentary, [I mean] there are pieces missing — there’s something that was a whole… something that was full and then because of transatlantic slave trade things shattered in different ways or got influenced, and shards got mixed around,” she said.
Those shards reflect many Jamaicans’ reluctance to discuss, let alone acknowledge, race as a factor in their everyday lives. According to Chedda, many citizens maintain that racism has no bearing on their society, instead naming issues with classism and unequal wealth distribution as the country’s primary issue.
Despite their refusal to see race, Chedda said, many still uphold Jamaica’s colorist hierarchy through what they call “shadism,” associating those with lighter skin with wealth and positive qualities, and those of darker complexions with poverty and negative characteristics.
She showcased “Views” and its conceptual predecessors — 2020’s “Untitled,” a summer 2021 installation called “Rebuild” and December 2021 collage titled “...We all live under the same sky” — in the “...and I resume the struggle” (A.I.R.T.S.) exhibition series she co-founded and co-curated with Jamaican visual artists Phillip Thomas, John Campbell, Kimani Beckford and Greg Bailey. The regionally acclaimed series contends with questions of power, privilege and post-coloniality in Jamaica and grapples with the concerns around climate, cultural and global identity, and social politics that the pandemic’s onset illuminated.
The initial group show debuted in-person after COVID-19 guidance eased in the country in December 2020, presenting the work of 12 Jamaican artists — a mix of established creatives and recent grads from Edna Manley college (where Chedda works as a visual art professor) — and three artist panels at the Olympia Gallery in Kingston for two months. A.I.R.T.S has since seen four more expanded exhibitions between 2021 and 2023. The most recent one, (IN)DEPENDENCE, concluded at the end of January.
With the cement blocks either a focal point or background motif in the displays, Chedda’s work in each of the exhibitions called on viewers to question their relationships to Jamaica’s historical sites and their colonial beginnings alongside the ways they’ve been taught to see themselves through the structures.
Meant to remind the viewer of both rubble and a pyramidal shrine, Chedda debuted the first iteration of “Rebuild” in 2015 at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince Haiti. Photo credit: L and caption adapted from the artist’s.
In her artist statement for “Rebuild,” a continuation of her 2015 Ghetto Biennale installation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, of the same name, Chedda explains her hope that Jamaicans might “rebuild ourselves anew” from the resulting catastrophe of colonialism.
“I want viewers to be more aware of the fact that there was this history — for example at Rose Hall Great House — that there was a trauma that would have happened on the land that I feel like is being ignored or veiled by a touristic vantage point,” she told Digital Junkanoo. “It's like the trauma is being hidden underneath a smile.”
“Views” and other work aims to “highlight aspects of our culture and our identity in a way that people will think about it and will really be more sensitive to the idea of our own — even blackness.” she continued, citing many Jamaicans’ struggles with skin bleaching and some dancehall songs’ violent lyrics.
Post-Coloniality and We
Chedda’s objection to Jamaica’s cultural fragmentation stems from her own search for an identity as a Black woman on the island. Through sketches of broken bodies and self-portraits eroded from the impernance of paint on her plastic bag canvases, she considers the value ascribed to Jamaican people, particularly Afro-Jamaicans, in an effort to self-define.
She described her pursuit to determine her value in the pieces that flake off her creations and the materials she uses to construct them in an ART(ist) video for the Rubis Mécénat endowment fund: “It contains, and I contain my words. It covers, and I was hiding my ugliness, my truth, my identity. It protects, and I was being shielded from people’s words, abuse, pressure. It preserves, and I was trying to preserve my sanity,” she said in the video.
Camille Chedda, Portrait. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Art helped Chedda, born in Manchester and raised in St. Elizabeth’s Santa Cruz, cope with the challenges she faced at home. Her love for drawing grew out of copying her older sister, and she continued developing her creative practice long after her sister quit, ultimately becoming her high school’s designated “art person.”
When she realized that she could study art professionally after graduating, the decision to pursue it as a career came easily. She completed an honors bachelor of fine arts program at Edna Manley College in Kingston and went on to earn a masters in paintings from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Painting, drawing and sculpting empowered her to look at herself and, in turn, dive into research about who Jamaicans are in general, she said. “It led to thinking about the post colonial situation that we're in, and how that dictates the way people view privilege or power so that affects where people decide to live, what people wear.”
As she and her collaborators work to develop the next installment of A.I.R.T.S, slated for this December, Chedda has also embarked on a project for community arts non-profit Kingston Creative as part of a new Global Co-commission initiative called “A Feral Commons.” The co-commission chose three international artists to approach the subject of climate change in a public work that examines humans’ interdependence with nature in the artists’ respective corners of the globe.
Chedda will assemble her installation at the neglected Lower South Camp Park in Kingston and explore the edible and medicinal Rice and Peas bush’s role as a pollinator in the overgrown environment. She plans to create an apiary for the bees that community members can cultivate, build new skills from and source honey from.
The project, she said, is similar to “Views” in how it questions what was once present on the land and how that past has been transformed or left behind. But it also carries over the sculpture’s ruminations on Jamaica’s post-colonial identity and her personal identity, as evidenced by the presence of cement blocks, which appear as part of the apiary’s core structure in her pre-planning sketches.
“I feel they represent two different mindsets that I'm in,” Chedda said of her two preferred art materials: concrete blocks and plastic bags. “Maybe certain things haven't been resolved in either one, but they represent me still going through this process of trying to uncover this identity.”
To learn more about Chedda’s work and process, visit www.camillechedda.com or view the artist’s Instagram.
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@camillechedda. “Camille Chedda.” Instagram, December 2012.
@resumethestruggle. “A.I.R.T.S.” Instagram, November 2020.
Alserkal Online. “A Feral Commons.” Alskeral Avenue LLC, May 24, 2023.
Brown, Jheanelle. “Scaffolding Time.” Art At A Time Like This (blog), May 2022.
Chedda, Camille. “CAMILLE CHEDDA.” Camille Chedda, 2022.
Contemporary and América Latina. “(IN)DEPENDENCE.” C& AMÉRICA LATINA, January 17, 2023.
DuQuesnay, Frederick J. “Rose Hall Great House,” 1964. Jamaica Family Search.
Embassy of Jamaica. “History of Jamaica.” Embassy of Jamaica Washington, DC. Accessed June 17, 2023.
The Jamaica Gleaner. “‘... And I Resumed the Struggle’ Opens at Olympia Gallery.” July 18, 2021.
Jamaica Great Houses. “Rose Hall.” Fiwi Roots. Accessed June 17, 2023.
Loop News. “Miss Jamaica Universe Slammed for ‘Annie Palmer’ National Costume.” December 7, 2019.
Mayne, Marcia. “Rose Hall, Jamaica’s (Haunted) Great House.” InsideJourneys (blog), March 4, 2011.
The Olympia Gallery. “ECatalogue ‘...and I Resumed the Struggle.’” Issuu, December 28, 2020.
The Olympia Gallery. “Various Artists ‘...And I Resumed the Struggle.’” 2020.
The Olympia Gallery. “...And I Resumed the Struggle. December 2021.” Issuu, December 16, 2021.
The Olympia Gallery. “‘...And I Resumed the Struggle.’ Summer Edition, 2021.” Issuu, July 19, 2021.
Poupeye, Veerle. “Review: And I Resumed the Struggle.” Perspectives, June 24, 2021.
Rose Hall Jamaica. “Real Estate Residential & Commercial.” Rose Hall. Accessed June 17, 2023.
Rose Hall Jamaica. “Rose Hall Great House Day & After Dark Tours.” Rose Hall. Accessed June 17, 2023.
Rose Hall Jamaica. “Rose Hall Holdings LTD.” Rose Hall. Accessed June 17, 2023.
Rose Hall Jamaica. “White Witch Golf Course - Montego Bay Golf.” Rose Hall. Accessed June 17, 2023.
On the Brink: Nadia Huggins’ “Coral & Ash” Exhibition
In her New York solo exhibition debut, Vincentian artist Nadia Huggins invites viewers to the brink of climate disaster in the Caribbean to show them how people of the region adapt with it.
“Coral & Ash” opened to the New York University community and almost 200 RSVP’d guests on April 25. Photo credit to Manuel Molina Martagón unless otherwise stated.
When a strong wind blows through the lush, earthen bush of an island in the Caribbean, exposing the whitened undersides of broad-leafed plants like the heart-shaped dasheen, elders say that it’s about to rain.
The leaves, when upturned in anticipation of the impending rainfall, represent something about to happen, a kernel of Indigenous knowledge passed down through generations of Caribbean people turned metaphor in the everyday.
Such is the scene that Vincentian visual artist Nadia Huggins encountered while documenting environmental differences in the wilderness of Greiggs, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the sentiment encapsulated in the central image of her latest solo exhibition, “Coral & Ash,” in New York City.
“That's really something that I find is important for me to relate in my work,” Huggins said of the sense of prescience the leaves project. “It's like, ‘How do I translate this idea of film sequence into an image? What is that moment – the essential moment – that really tells that story of when something shifts, when there's a change in the environment?’”
The image of overturned dasheen leaves, from Huggins’ ongoing body of work, “Bush,” adds a pop of green to an otherwise blue-and-gray-toned exhibition, separating two sides of art photography that cover the two-story walls of New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s atrium in Washington Square. The exhibition, presented by NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, opened last month and runs until Dec. 20.
Agency That Lives and Breathes
Having grown up in St. Vincent and lived in St. Lucia, the Trinidad-born, conceptual and documentary photographer considers herself Caribbean in an expansive sense. She endeavors in the show not to represent the Antilles but to paint a holistic picture of the region from the inside out to tell viewers that what they see “belongs to us,” she said.
“Coral & Ash” showcases work peppered with “visual signifiers,” like coconut trees, breeze blocks and shared body language, meant to remind any Caribbean viewer of home. Images from Huggins’ 2014 “Circa no future” climb the KJCC’s walls as they chronicle the erosion of Black Vincentian boys’ performances of masculinity during their familiar activity of diving beneath the sea’s surface.
Lead curator Dantaé Elliott, a PhD candidate in NYU’s Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature department, speaks with guests in front of the main exhibition wall during the “Coral & Ash” opening.
The gradual degradation of a coral reef, represented by the vivid turquoise pictures speckled with pinks and oranges of the Caribbean Sea from her coral surveys and acclaimed body of diptychs “Transformations,” cover the wall to the right of the overturned dasheen. To the left, the grand, billowing plumes of grays and dry-earth browns of the ashfall following the 2021 eruption of the La Soufrière volcano in St. Vincent, documented and compiled into Huggins’ “The Beginning is the End and the End is the Beginning,” draw onlookers’ eyes.
Through the perspective of her images, the exhibition becomes at-once an ecological archive and an almanac of Caribbean people as they exist in their space, a point-of-view often omitted in traditional imagery of the Caribbean.
“Nadia's work refuses what I've called the ‘photographic capture’ of places and subjects that conform to the visual regimes of empire and tourism,” exhibition curator and Hemispheric Institute Director Dr. Ana Dopico said. “They affirm relation, intimacy, interiority, complicated memory, and experience. The images are not made to please, though they are stunning, they are made, it seems to me, to reveal a deep political relation to place, to self, to race, to climate.”
Hemispheric Institute Director and NYU Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese Ana Dopico speaks during the opening reception.
And they do.
Images of coral throughout the exhibition are tagged with coordinates of their approximate location, a call back to Huggins’ nine years of documenting the changes in the reefs. But the identifiers also became crucial when the wealthy investors behind the La Vue Hotel & Beach Club proposed to remove a living reef in St. Vincent’s Indian Bay, import additional sand for the beach and install an artificial reef in its place near the shoreline in 2021.
Huggins used the labeled images as evidence that the reef, presumed dead in the developer’s environmental assessment, was still alive. She built an online campaign displaying the coral at various stages in proper coloring, galvanizing her community to write letters of disapproval to the country’s planning board and helping to bring the development’s promise of upheaval to a halt.
“There's a kind of environmental prejudice that happens beyond just people; it expands as well to these multi species [of marine organisms], ultimately,” Huggins said of the ways imagery of the Caribbean invisibilizes those living in the region, adding, “Unless something is aesthetically pleasing to people, they don't quite understand it has a role in the environment.”
The photos of ash-covered leaves and thick plumes of smoke in the wake of La Soufrière’s eruption in northern St. Vincent also serve a political purpose, monitoring the explosion’s impact on the natural environment.
Huggins documented the fallout on the island, which was split into green, yellow and red zones based on the severity of the damage, intentionally excluding people from her shoots to subvert the photography that often exploits those affected by climate disaster.
Though the green zone in the southern part of the island where Huggins lives has almost completely recovered from the explosion, the Indigenous Garifuna and Kalinago communities in the north’s red zones are still navigating the impacts of the ashfall, facing displacement, changes to their river routes and a loss of access to the rest of the island when the Rabbaca River floods during the rainy season.
In the process of creating the body of work now known as “The Beginning is the End and the End is the Beginning,” Huggins isolated her scope to her zone — opting instead to develop programs to help people in the north document their experiences — because she felt they weren’t hers to relate.
Her images propose a “kind of subtle insertion of agency that lives and breathes around our space,” according to lead curator of “Coral & Ash” Dantaé Elliott, who is Jamaican.
“She and the other people that are in the images know what's going on in and around the water there, or in the landscapes as it's changing, and they're learning to live with these changes as they’re happening because they’re evolving with it,” she said, speaking broadly of Huggins’ artwork.
The Art of Catastrophe
The exhibition was born from a guest lecture Huggins did on the La Soufrière eruption in 2021 — per Ph.D. student Elliott’s recommendation — in Dopico’s NYU seminar “Huracán,” which interrogated the hurricane and other environmental disasters’ impact on the Caribbean and the ways its people evolved with the catastrophes.
The course drew on the late Bajan cultural theorist, poet and former NYU professor Kamau Brathwaite’s assertion that “art must come out of catastrophe,” inspiring Huggins to merge, for the first time, her latest work documenting the eruption and previous work capturing environmental issues during the class, Elliott said.
Shortly after the lecture, Elliott successfully recommended Huggins for the Hemispheric Institute’s Mellon Foundation-funded artist residency. Over the next two years, they developed the concept that became “Coral & Ash” through conversations centering their experiences as people from similar environments plagued by similar disasters.
“I always felt that I had never seen the Jamaica or the Caribbean that I knew when I was growing up. So I've always had that sensation of, ‘Okay, everything that I see about the space that I interact with comes from a gaze that's not what I connect with,” Elliott said of her reasons for admiring Huggins’ work.
“But especially with “Circa no future” and the other images…she is documenting a life that a lot of Caribbean people can connect with because it could be anywhere in the Caribbean,” she added.
Spoken-word poet Yaissa Jiménez performed a piece from her new poetry series, “Poemas de Protección.”
“Coral & Ash” invites viewers from other parts of the world to meditate on and deepen their knowledge of the region and its history, too. It creates an intentionally immersive experience enhanced by the transformation of an adjoining conference room into a reflective space where videos of Huggins’ nature walks and regular swims loop.
Its April 25 opening reception saw an expansive audience of NYU community members and nearly 200 RSVP’d guests, welcomed by what Elliot called the “ancestral power” brought forth in Afro-Dominican poet Yaissa Jiménez’s provocative performance of “Poemas de Protección” (Protection Poems) at the start of the event.
“[The reception] was great because a lot of different people from the diaspora came out — so from Trinidad and Tobago, St. Vincent, Haiti to Jamaica — so I still felt like I had a bit of a Caribbean community there,” Huggins said. “And people really connected to the work, even people who weren't necessarily from the Caribbean.
“I think it gave them an access point into the region to see us in a different way, and I think that was really, really, really special,” she continued, reflecting on the event and the exhibition from her home in Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Clad in navy-blue, Huggins sat just off center, sipping tea from a vermilion mug labeled “hotter” in front of a wall littered with artwork blurred by her background filter.
Huggins welcomes the attendees and introduces the exhibition during the “Coral & Ash” opening reception.
She explained that the exhibition was the first time she’d ever been able to synthesize her work, especially that of the last four years, through an ecological theme. The show breaks down the perceived dichotomy between coral and ash — sea and land — instead offering a pointed reflection on their roles in the very fabric of the environment.
“Coral broken down turns into white sand, and ash is ultimately black sand,” she said. Both are geological formations that make up the island.
True, too, is that Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous people in the Caribbean compose the island themselves, as evidenced through Huggins’ work. They live and evolve with the island, and the land lives and evolves with its people. Both tell fraught, yet sentimental stories of a cherished home residing on the brink of disaster amidst the rapidly progressing climate crisis.
With her recent trove of global acclaim, Huggins aims to direct her increased access to once-rare resources toward her calling: making work in and about the Caribbean to develop the photographic practice of the region and build communities to sustain it.
“I feel connected to this. I know it's important, not just from a personal point of view,” she said. “I feel a deep sense of responsibility to make images about here. It doesn’t necessarily have to be specifically about [St. Vincent and the Grenadines], but I've already kind of developed a language — a visual language — from the images that I'm encountering here.”
Nadia Huggins is one of Digital Junkanoo’s inaugural Art x Tech Fellows for 2022-23. To learn more about her work and practice, visit nadiahuggins.com. For more information about how to view the “Coral & Ash” exhibition, which is free and open to the public, head to the Hemispheric Institute’s website.
bibliography
Gugolati, Maica. “Landscaping with Nadia Huggins and Richard Fung.” Faire Monde(s), January 16, 2021.
Huggins, Nadia. “Nadia Huggins.” Accessed May 2023.
Huggins, Nadia. “nadiahuggins.” Instagram, 2011.
Muffson, Beckett. “Split-Screen Coral Photos Free This Artist from Her Body.” VICE, October 12, 2016.
Shouts in Caruaru: Art Against A White Revolution
Drawing on her rich cultural heritage, Afro-Brazilian visual artist Ana Lira uses her artwork to challenge tropical fascism and interject white progressive movements.
Lira’s “Quantos Calos,” a banner created in 2018, asks viewers, “How many calluses of your black hand hold together a white revolution?” when translated into English. Photos courtesy of Ana Lira unless otherwise stated.
Editor’s Note: The interview this story is based on was conducted in Brazilian Portuguese. All quotes are the author’s translations of Lira’s words.
A black canvas hangs from a wall in a busy Brazilian metropolis — perhaps São Paulo, Recife, Manaus or Curitiba. It interrupts the routine of pedestrians, commuters and demonstrators with a troubling reflection in white letters: “Quantos calos da tua mão negra sustentam uma branca revolução?” (“How many calluses of your black hand hold together a white revolution?”)
Through the use of the verb “sustentar,” the piece’s creator, Afro-Brazilian visual artist Ana Lira, places the metaphor back in the hands of Black Brazilians exploited since colonial compositions. In Brazilian Portuguese, the verb’s first connotation is to support and sustain like pillars in a building, while its second is to feed, raise, maintain and provide shelter. In playing with this double meaning, Lira accuses whiteness of imposing the burden of emancipatory projects upon Black workers. Through the artwork, she reminds white progressives that despite Black people making the rebel dream possible, they have been the silenced characters of Brazilian history.
Lira’s provocation comes in defiance of the 2018 social media campaign #NinguémSoltaAMãoDeNinguém (#WeWillNotLetGoOfEachOthersHand), which arose from progressive Brazilians’ hopelessness in the wake of former president Jair Bolsonaro’s election that same year and the far-right leader’s bigoted statements and actions against historically vulnerable groups.
“The problem is that well-meaning progressives considered Bolsonaro’s election the only hecatomb in Brazil,” Lira told me in a November interview. “While whiteness pretends to spearhead political campaigns, my work reminds us how Afro-Brazilians have structured their revolutionary slogans.”
Não-Dito/Unsaid documented a public program in Belem. Top left: Coletivo Pitiú presenting their work in our weekly meeting. Top right: a meeting focused on hearing women who work in the traditional street market, Ver-O-Peso, in Belem (PA) about the government intervention in the area. Bottom left: receiving artist Arthur Leandro/Tatá Kinamboji to discuss impacts of the violence that affects Afrobrazilian territories in Amazonia. Bottom right: an experience to dance the word “collective” conducted by Nego Rai, from Centro Cultural Coisas de Negro, during a visit to Icoaraci district, a traditional Afrobrazilian region in Belem. Caption courtesy of the artist.
Historians and political theorists are yet to decide if the last years of Brazilian politics have been worse than the two decades of dictatorial rule in the mid-to-late 1900s. Despite the impasse, it is clear that Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 dredged up a collectivizing sense among progressive forces, leading to an urgent need for mutual-aid calls to action against his ghastly tropical fascism. Cross-class, -race and -gender alliance seemed to be the only path toward reconstruction. Yet Lira’s artwork harped a cautious melody even as Bolsonaro rose to office.
Amidst an already divided political climate, viewers of Lira’s banner wonder why she would provoke division between progressives seeking solidarity against fear. Why pose a question with the potential to create internal tensions and oppose a Leftist campaign against Bolsonarism? Is she against collective solidarity in times of authoritarianism? Does she fail to understand that internal tensions among progressive forces would be precisely what Bolsonarism wished to deploy, a divide-and-conquer method against oppressed groups?
Perhaps, her canvas is a haunting reminder that a real revolution must reckon with racial dynamics, or it will not be a revolution but a face-lift of a system that fails to defy white supremacy.
Revolution in the Salon
Stylized portrait of Ana Lira, 2020.
Unlike most, Lira talks about revolutionary practice as a domestic form because relevant chapters of Brazilian socialist and communist parties took place in her living room. Born in Caruaru, a city just outside Recife, the capital of the state Pernambuco, in the 1970s, Lira grew up in Jaboatão de Guararapes, a remote Recife district under intense military control and embroiled in political dispute.
In 1964, 13 years before Lira’s birth, conservative armed forces conducted a coup d’état that ousted the democratically-elected, left-leaning president, Jõao Goulart, and gained authoritarian control of Brazil’s government. As the civic-military-entrepreneurial dictatorship, headed by Gen. Castelo Branco, unfolded, middle-class Brazilian communists found refuge and work abroad. For Black working-class communists, however, low-profile positions across the country became the only alternative.
On December 13, 1968, the dictatorship initiated its most tyrannical phase. The Fifth Institutional Act suspended the Constitution, dissolved Congress and legitimized censorship and political persecution. As a result, political opponents, including Lira’s father, had their rights revoked for associations with communism.
Her father’s return to the Brazilian Northeast from São Paulo was far from accidental. It was an act of survival against state terrorism, giving him the only chance he had to survive the threats of torture and political execution at the height of authoritarianism.
“My father came to Recife when persecution became epistemic post-1968,” Lira said. “While he was still organized in the [Communist] Party, he planned forms to create better conditions for people in his impoverished district. When I was born in 1977, my household was practically a community cultural center.”
Considered one of the hubs of national, political and cultural thought, Northeast Brazil has the largest population of Afro-Brazilians across the country’s five regions, and only Nigeria has a Black population larger than Brazil’s. Accordingly, the Northeast has a lively arsenal of Afro-diasporic culture — including a plethora of musical instruments, Candomblé, Frevo and Axé — as a symbol of its history.
Despite its significance, the region has faced tremendous state absenteeism. As such, its states are constantly listed at the bottom of national human development indexes, revealing how racism seeps into public policies.
If Brazil is located within the periphery of global capitalism, growing up in Jaboatão meant residing on the periphery of the periphery of capitalism. As a materialization of adverse statistics, Lira grew up in a neighborhood under intense military control and dispute, resulting in a curfew that lasted ten years. From her teens to her first college years, Lira’s work schedule ran around the time of the dictatorial curfews, even after the official end of military rule in 1985.
In “nãoobrigado” (“nothanks” or “notforced”), Lira pulls from the political turmoil that characterized her adolescence and lays evidence on the filthy papers of Brazilian politics by presenting elections as a marketplace where candidates choose their voter-clients. She recomposes the pamphlet Brazilians use to record their chosen candidates’ numbers for input in the voting machine during national elections, covering these incomplete tags with powder, mud and shadows.
Lira’s recomposed Brazilian voting pamphlets for “nãoobrigado,” also known as “nothanks” or “notforced.”
Here, she plays with meaning again, evoking that of the term for electoral stronghold, curral eleitoral — literally interpreted as an electoral barn or sheepfold in Brazilian Portuguese — and “obrigado” (thank you), which connotes a paid due rather than free-of-charge gratitude.¹ As such, “nãoobrigado” refuses any obligation to Brazil’s political theater, rejects co-participation and presents the lack of agency in a democracy reduced to the ballot, relating voters to cattle moving toward the slaughterhouse and the traces of their voting ritual to an unexamined crime scene.
The Lillies Amongst the Rocks
Lira’s work possesses an intimacy and universality that perhaps originates from her simultaneous connection with her own domesticity and the public arena. Her mother’s singing and hums have been the grounds for her sonic experiments with art, such as her 2019 research into the musicality of the African diaspora turned multi-part program, Project CHAMA.
The joyous carnival celebrations of her upbringing also played a part, setting the stage for her participatory exhibition “Nos traquejos do tempo [vibração um]” (In the ways of time [vibration one]) in 2022. In partnership with Instituto do Tambor, the show celebrated freedom, community and knowledge production in Black and Indigenous music through specially-made hand drums from her state, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro.
“Art was a communal activity,” she said of her early years. “Our house became a shelter for art in a region lacking governmental assistance. We shared our local knowledge — weaving, singing, dancing and painting — as a form of collective care through culture.”
As the community prepared for the public festivities, Lira played with her creative potential through music, dance and artistic production. Potentially, this is one of the major differences in her artwork: her process tends to start when she is mingled amongst the masses.
She started her professional life studying Civil Engineering but later pursued a second degree in Journalism. Though she was never officially registered as a journalist, Lira worked as a radio hostess on local stations, promoting political debates and raising awareness on issues that affected those on the fringes.
Promotional image for Project Chama, Ana Lira, 2020.
Despite establishing a successful career, Lira found herself wanting to follow her dreams and achieve professional independence through art. She made her official debut as an artist at 32 (but only told her family of the change when she was 40) and has weaved radio programs into her exhibitions since.
Far from romanticizing a path where she has found more rocks than lilies, Lira’s talent has allowed her to transit through privileged positions, and her artwork has achieved worldwide recognition. She has exhibited her work in France, Netherlands and Mexico and at the Mercosur Biennale, and been nominated for one of Brazil’s most prestigious art awards, the PIPA Prize.
As she enters the 14th year of her artist career, her visuals speak. Rather than being solely fixed portraits, her paintings, photographs and stencils are simultaneously soundscapes. Even the visual metaphors she produces take on a movement that blurs the expected stability of images.
Lira adheres to the notions of redaction and annotation that Christina Sharpe wrote of in her 2016 book “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being”: “a counter to abandonment, another effort to try to look, to try to really see;” her work enlarges our perceptions as they advocate for self-reflexive social movements.
In her piece, “Parte da Família” (Part of the Family), she erases the images of white children exploiting Black women’s bodies for their entertainment, allowing the viewer to see a visual dysgraphia that contradicts the narratives of white supremacy and its forms of historicization.
Parte da Familia focused on the contemporary strategies of slavery that persists in Brazil. The group created a series of posters to be fixed in the streets. Caption adapted from the artist’s.
Employing the wordplay found across her artwork, “family” gains complexities in these collages due to the slave trade. Enslaved Black women, forced to labor in these casas grandes, became the families’ cooks, house cleaners, wet nurses and nannies while access to their own children was contingent on the enslaver’s approval. All the while, Portuguese colonizers in Brazil frequently committed acts of sexual violence against enslaved Black women. As such, the “familia” in Lira’s work evokes racial and gendered violence, rebelling against white framings of any emancipatory project that sidelines Afro-Brazilians.
In Opposition to the Promised Land
In considering the provocations she introduced during Bolsonaro’s years, Lira’s work is not divisive. Rather, it troubles ersatz alliances and strengthens solidarity among those fighting for radical racial equality. Her experience with liberal and progressive politics throughout her life has made her wary of strategies that flatten out — or even efface — race from the political rationale under the premise that we will solve other social problems when progressives gain power.
“Quantos Calos” rejects any future promise of left-wing reparation to structural racism only after Bolsonaro’s political decline. Lira’s wager is that racism should be reckoned with in the present — as a politics of everyday — as opposed to in the elusive promised land.
Her position reminds white liberals that while campaigning to keep their hands together in downtown São Paulo, police massacred Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples in favelas and rural districts. While the middle-class performative activism masquerading as a revolution flourished with glitzy slogans, the gunfire from military forces’ staged unfortunate spectacles against marginalized groups — every week and everywhere.
Avalição Grátis/Free Evaluation (2015- ) is work conceived from researching commercial street signs, started by Josivan Rodrigues with sign painted Odon’s help in Recife in 2015. In Recife, it was exhibited as sign where the following sentence is read: “Compro e Vendo Voto. Avalição Grátis” (I purchase and sell votes. Free quotation), painted by the Carioca sign painter. Placed in front of the gallery, the sign provoked the most divisive reactions, from indignation with the fact that someone was advertising the purchase and sell of votes to people entering the gallery to negotiate their votes for the coming elections. Caption adapted from the artist’s.
Lira’s life narrative proves that art can flourish despite political persecution and discrimination. The lessons of her father’s radicalism and mother’s songs allowed her to fall in love with feelings and affections that cannot be fully spelled out with theory. Her art became an avenue for projects with unstable answers.
In a milieu where color and delight seem incoherent, Lira’s work chooses precisely vibrant tonalities because her work moves, dances and sings back at the viewer. It is not only the object that speaks to you. Her voice becomes an incessant yet intimate call to converse privately with yourself and your rebel imaginations.
footnotes
¹ In Brazilian Portuguese “obrigado” stems from the expression "sou obrigado a agradecer a Vossa Mercê," which translates to “I am obliged/forced to thank thee."
Performance Artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s Future Memory Masquerade
Performance artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow explores the rich African-derived tradition of junkanoo by reflecting on her Jamaican-American identity and immigration story in an August 2022 exhibition.
Performance artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow stands in front of a wall displaying the name of the exhibition. Photo credit to Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe unless otherwise stated.
When visitors entered Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s exhibit at FiveMyles art and performance space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, they first saw the contrast.
The gallery opened at ground level welcoming passersby to peek inside. Colorful costumes added bursts of color to the gray room, hanging from the ceiling to evoke their invisible wearers: a bright red dress with a white bustle rested its hem on the floor, its back turned. Another crowned, gray-faced figure stood squarely, its bodice covered in strips of green and linen. The black cloaked member with rainbow-colored tresses followed just behind them, and the hand-drawn face engulfed by a rainbow of flowing fabric pieces dangled in-between.
Two sheer, white tapestries screen printed with the Jamaican and New York state coats of arms hung side-by-side in the back, acting as the imagined stage curtains from which the sculptures came.
The Jamaican and New York State Coats of Arms appear on two tapestries at the back of the exhibition.
The exhibition, “Junkanooacome,” began on Aug. 6, 2022 and ran until Sept. 4, bookended by the 60th anniversary of the performance artist’s home country, Jamaica’s, independence from British colonial rule and the return of the West Indian Day Parade. It’s the most recent installment of her four-year-old, ongoing and multi-media project of the same name, and a party-inspired ode to an African-derived tradition she holds as a forgotten remnant of her complex heritage.
“I wanted the audience to feel like they’re a part of this [street masquerade] – they're witnessing the ‘ghosts’ of this party,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said over the phone. “There are no figures physically in this space besides the viewer, but the costumes represent the ghosts of these junkanoo revelers from the past.”
Reveling in Resistance
A video projected on the wall to the right of the entrance showed Lyn-Kee-Chow dressed in black and white masquerade, a wide-brimmed hat featuring a miniature replica of the White House on her head. Just across the room, the White House sat on a pedestal beneath her character sketches, inviting viewers to interrogate the blueprints of the United States as a nation.
Save the use of the American landmark instead of a Jamaican plantation house, the costume resembled that of the 1837 lithograph "Jaw-Bone, or House John Canoe" by Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario, who’s 19th century Sketches of Character series captured Afro-Jamaican life and culture prior to emancipation.
Lyn-Kee-Chow’s Jack(ie) in the Green Character dangles in front of a series of character sketches from the early stages of the “Junkanooacome” project.
“Junkanooacome” draws on the “John Canoe” or junkanoo parade, a satire-laden masquerade and ceremony akin to carnival that’s held after Christmas throughout the Caribbean. The tradition began in the region as early as the 17th century when enslaved African participants gathered in costume to celebrate a rare day off and mock their enslavers.
Lyn-Kee-Chow derives her project’s title – meaning in Jamaican patwa “Junkanoo is coming” – from the chant of onlookers announcing the arrival of the masqueraders, who pose, dance and play the roles of regional characters like Devil, Pitchy Patchy and House Head. While junkanoo shares African-inspired costumes and a history of rebellion with carnival, the traditions differ in their popularity.
Carnival, though heavily commercialized compared to its early Afro-Indigenous influences, boasts parades from Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil to offshoots in the U.S, the UK, Canada and Japan. Junkanoo, on the other hand, is lesser known and less celebrated in the Caribbean outside of The Bahamas’ acclaimed, yearly festivities.
The red dress represents the Red, Set-Girls characters in Jamaican junkanoo. Lyn-Kee-Chow based the assemblage on Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837 lithograph “Red, Set-Girls and Jack-in-the-Green.”
“It’s a side effect of being colonized because even my parents didn’t grow up seeing junkanoo,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said of junkanoo’s relative obscurity in Jamaica. “It [was] a certain class of people that would hang onto this tradition and celebrate it, and it's the most Afrocentric in its form of celebration.”
Through an “Americanized” imagining of Jamaican junkanoo characters, she harnesses the festival’s foundation of resistance through revelry to highlight the afterlife of enslavement alongside the vibrant Afro-descendant histories born from it. The project’s handful of performances and workshops have called viewers to create costumes from scrapped materials, parade in mas bands down New York City streets and confront the remnants of slavery found throughout the city’s historical landmarks.
She seeks to revive the tradition and instill in her audience the value of the ritual for contemporary masqueraders. For them, junkanoo is a celebration of freedom, an homage to ancestors and a remembrance of their rich African lineage. For her, junkanoo is also a vessel through which she makes sense of the complex histories coloring her heritage and immigration story.
“I want people to have an understanding of [junkanoo] in some sense coming from someone who identifies as Jamaican but is also other things, other identities,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said.
Frozen in Time and Living a Life of Its Own
Born in Manchester, Jamaica, in 1975, Lyn-Kee-Chow spent her first 11 years on the island soaking in her cultures as best she could. Her grandmother’s mismatched home decor and her favorite Jamaican TV shows fill her childhood memories prior to her family’s migration to Atlanta, Georgia in 1986.
Their international move changed everything – her lifestyle, her sense of belonging, her family’s middle-class status. She recalls replacing the Jamaican pantomimes, Bruce Lee movies and Westerns she grew up on with American soaps and MTV in an effort to assimilate to her new surroundings, to gain a semblance of home in an unfamiliar place.
Lyn-Kee-Chow’s reimaginings of three Jamaican junkanoo characters — Horse Head, Pitchy Patchy and Wild Indian — stand in the center of the exhibition.
“To make that move for me was sad,” she said. “Of course, as a child I felt uprooted and just felt like a complete outsider, out of place, not able to relate to being completely African American obviously, not able to relate culturally.”
Though those early efforts to acclimate fell short, the sense of errancy migrating left her with became a comfort as she aged.
She recognized in it the synchronicity of her new life with those of the enslaved African ancestors who survived the trauma of the Middle Passage and centuries of forced labor during the enslavement era. And again, it appeared in the lives of her Chinese ancestors whose harrowing journeys to replace newly emancipated Africans as indentured laborers brought them to the island in the 19th century. Both were forced to settle in the unknown land she called home.
From that realization and the family histories that undergird it she draws the inspiration for the art and performances she’s created throughout her nearly 20-year career.
"Jaw Bone, or House John Canoe" is a lithograph from Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837-38 series “Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica.” Photo from the Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora database.
“As an immigrant, my memory of my country of origin is both frozen in time and lives a life of its own, where it perhaps comes to represent something else entirely,” she writes on her website. “My goal is to pinpoint that ephemeral fleeting image of a once perfect landscape, and to celebrate Jamaica’s proud society.”
Lyn-Kee-Chow, now based in Queens, New York, makes critiquing first-world capitalism – from consumerism and hyper-tourism to colonial behaviors – the focal point of her work. She pulls on nostalgic memories of Jamaica, Caribbean folklore, feminism, environmentalism and globalism in her artistic process and incorporates wearable sculpture, drawings and readymade objects into her pieces.
Her most notable works – “Gypsies' Picnic: The veins of Oya was always here,” “8 years to Freedom,” “The Widow” and “Crop Killa Soca Social” – each follow that blueprint while investigating a different part of her identity.
And the School of Visual Arts faculty member has seen a plethora of acclaim over the course of her career. Since graduating from New World School of the Arts with a BFA in 1996 and from Hunter College with a MFA in 2006, she’s received five art awards and a handful of residencies, including her most recent with Wave Hill Winter Workspace in the Bronx.
Reworked Histories and Converging Identities
Since the installation’s closing in early September, Lyn-Kee-Chow has redirected her focus to newer projects. She’s playing three characters in the “Living Histories of Sugar” performance project, which seeks to challenge established historical narratives about sugar work and enslavement through the self-exploration of Caribbean and Scottish performance artists.
The first show of three debuted in Kingston, Jamaica, on Oct. 20, and the remaining performances, free and open to the public, took place in Greenock and Edinburgh, Scotland, on Oct. 27 and Oct. 28, respectively.
“I'm excited about it – it’s my acting debut, yes – and I'm making costumes for it and props and visuals,” she said.
But “Junkanooacome” will always occupy an invaluable space in her personal and professional journey.
A minimalist recreation of a ship carrying enslaved Africans saved from a previous “Junkanooacome” performance at Asbury Park in New Jersey sits on a ledge.
As just one part of the project, the exhibit stood at the convergence of her lived experience and her life’s work, an intersection represented by the less noticeable artwork on the outskirts of the space: the star of butterflies made from commemorative Jamaican $100 notes for a 2012 conference celebrating the island’s 50th anniversary of independence. The minimalist recreation of a ship made of nothing more than a white sail and a thin floorplan bearing silhouettes of the enslaved people packed tightly in its interior – a memento she saved from a previous performance. The coats of arms of her two homes hanging at the back of the room.
As a whole, while “Junkanooacome” honors Afro-Jamaican traditions of resistance and celebrations of freedom, it also stands as a ponderance of her identities, lineages and histories, a rumination on home and belonging as she makes sense of the Jamaicanness her migration made her leave behind and the Americanness it forced her to adopt.
“It's a way to reclaim agency and space when it comes to freedom, basically,” she said. “And, at the same time, it’s a way to honor my heritage and these traditions through the exploration of these characters.”
Lyn-Kee-Chow’s “ghost revelers” of junkanoos’ past reiterate a quotidian truth of our global community: everyone wears a mask. But in doing so, “Junkanooacome” also emphasizes the histories that brought the mask to the fore, reaching behind it to unearth the linkages that influenced its decoration.
Her work holds an architectural power that does not take space for granted. It channels what a delicate and sacred dance it is to create a space for ceremony in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. While so much was stolen, what was retained in gestures spurs new works of art and creative worlds celebrating Black life.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, in conversation with Digital Junkanoo Director Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, discussed “Junkanooacome” and her creative process in Digital Junkanoo’s first event on May 15, 2023. A transcript of the IG Live talk is coming soon. To learn more about Lyn-Kee-Chow’s work, visit jodielynkeechow.com.
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