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
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."