Category: Barbados

Fresh Milk III

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Join us on January 15th 2012 at 5pm, at the Milking Parlour Studio, Walkers Dairy, St. George in welcoming visual artists and writers to the FRESH MILK platform.  (For directions visit http://www.annaleedavis.com/contact/index.html)

The Programme

Part One of the programme: , ‘The MFA Experience: Two Perspectives’

Alberta Whittle and Harriet Rollitt, (two Barbadian Visual Artists who have just graduated with MFA degrees from the UK) kick off the event by sharing their Graduate school experiences and discuss how the Masters programme has impacted on their practice.

Part Two of the programme: ‘MEMOIR MOMENTS: ABROAD – A life stories event’.

In this life stories event emcee’d by Dorothea Smartt – Linda Deane, Adrian Green, Harriet Rollitt, Alberta Whittle and Dorothea Smartt – with only twenty images in ten minutes, will convey their memoir moments related to our chosen theme: “Abroad”. Each interpretation will be unique to each presenter. They may confound or confirm your expectations, with their personal take on the theme.

This ‘pecha kucha’ inspired format, was founded by London’s Woolfson & Tay Bookshop for their pioneering ‘Life Stories Cafe’. Dorothea Smartt, the events’ Emcee and co-curator, together with Fresh Milk, will introduce the format to a new audience here in Barbados. Come watch & listen, discover how each uses the constraints and possibilities of ‘twenty images: ten minutes’.

Call for Artists to Participate in a Local Residency

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FRESH MILK is providing a unique opportunity for Barbadian artists to participate in a local residency at the Milking Parlour in March 2012. The format will be a daytime residency, for a week long, two artists residing simultaneously, with an open evening at the completion to present the work created during the artists’ time here. It is open to contemporary creatives across all areas of the arts, and is a great chance to expand your networks and the range of work you produce!

To be eligible, please submit an application (maximum 2 pages) outlining a little bit about yourselves, why you would like to participate in a FRESH MILK residency, and what type of work you would like to produce at the residency. Attach up to five images of recent work. FRESH MILK is particularly keen to support young artists resident in Barbados who are interested in making work in dialogue or in collaboration with another contemporary practitioner. Applications can be sent to annaleedavis@gmail.com, no later that February 3rd 2012.

To learn more about residencies and the benefits they provide, you can refer to this article by Natalie McGuire: https://freshmilkbarbados.com/2011/10/12/artist-residencies-and-barbados/

Performance Art @ Fresh Milk II St. George Barbados by Yasmine Espert

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Fullbright Scholar Yasmine Espert shares her thoughts on the Fresh Milk II event:

Performance Art @ Fresh Milk II
St. George, BARBADOS.

This is Sandra Vivas. And believe it or not, this (was) performance art. The only thing missing from this image is the elegy she belted out as she bathed herself in fresh, uncooked eggs.

I tried to put the protein aside and focus on the poem she laced with resentment but…

1. I was confounded by the use of eggs. During the performance, I kept asking myself: is she really going to use the whole dozen?

2. She chose to speak in Spanish. I was able to grasp a line here and there (thank you high school/college español), but for the most part, I was lost between her garbled words and the occasional egg yolk that landed in her mouth.

Did she plan this? Why aim for the grotesque?

Vivas’ performance did result in a few chuckles from the audience. I’m not sure if that was her intention — but I am sure that she got my attention. Later that night I came across an English translation of her piece. Like many of her works, it gave a fascinating, albeit bizarre, unveiling of the issues women face today (take a look at her YouTube page for more)

Leandro Soto, a contemporary Cuban performance artist (aka “the first performance artist de Cuba) told me that performance art is about the now…”you never choreograph. You always trust in the moment.”

No matter what your (political) message is, you have to confide in improvisation. Even if it means you have to bathe in raw eggs.

Imagine if we all approached life that way.

Food For Thought

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© Carlie Ester Pipe

 

Sandra Vivas performance piece at Fresh Milk

On Saturday, November 19th Fresh Milk offered Barbados a taste of performance art. Coming to us with the distinct Venezuelan flavour of Sandra Vivas, an inspirational performance artist from Caracas, we were given the opportunity to consume art in a whole new way.

Performance art, is an abstruse concept. In my humble understandings (for I’m a writer, not a historian) what I will ignorantly-just-for-this-essay call “regular art” is easier to define and therefore control. It’s trappable between the edges of the canvas, the brushstrokes that are created at 4.55pm on Tuesday are then frozen in time and so remain until they are destroyed. The author will not outlive her work, and she may hide from it, reject it, and walk away from it. In essence, “regular art” is a tangible, touchable creation that is confined to a four sided parallelogram that may never be altered from the day it was birthed, and may be viewed in exactly the same state by anyone, anywhere, at any given moment.

Performance art, on the other hand, is intangible. The author IS the performance, and for that reason she can never walk away from her piece. She is the piece. She is not confined to a canvas, she is only restricted to the 3D limitations of our perceptions of the realm in which we live. Though her performance may be viewed (live) again and again and again…it will never be the same twice. What we viewed on Saturday, she may well have performed in likeness elsewhere, but given the environment, audience, available props and humanity of the author, it was unique.

Sandra’s piece was the first act of performance art that I have ever encountered in person. For those of you unfortunate enough not to be there, this is my opinion of what happened:

Sandra stood in front of a wooden table with two dozen eggs. One by one, she cracked the eggs on the table, and poured the raw, slimy viscera over her face and lamented loudly:

According to you, I’m the bad one. Your poisonous words have hurt me, your vampire speech has hurt me, and according to you, I’m the bad one.

That’s not verbatim, that’s the gist. Her speech was in Spanish and her movements methodical. The eggs, a symbol of dreams not brought to fruition, life that could not be fulfilled, are dashed, cracked, and she is punished as the slime which symbolizes the hurtful words of “you” are poured all over her. There is pain in the relationship between herself and this “you” she refers to. We the audience are feeling her anguish, and watching her be mocked in this monotonous and repetitive punishment.

But, there is a catch. Sandra says, “I came out ahead.” Repeating this line at the end of her verses, her pain suddenly changes into pleasure.

The eggs she cracks allow her to break out of her shell, and away from this tormentuous “you”. She’s no longer pouring slime on her head, she’s nourishing her body and mind with yolk. Sandra becomes more confident and slowly but surely, she has cracked twenty-two of the two dozen eggs. The two remaining eggs are left in opposite crates, alone but separate. This separation represents the separation of herself, from “you”. By the time the final egg has been cracked and fed to her body, she is lavishing in its maternal yolk, and welcomes it into her mouth. Then, with a cheeky lifting of her skirt to show off glowing panties, she taunts the audience and reminds us that she indeed came out ahead.
The raw and hurtful words that “you” inflicted upon her, in the end only made her a stronger woman.

Sandra’s performance was the icing on the cake, but it certainly wasn’t all that was on the menu. Fresh Milk also presented to us an idea of what it is like to be an artist in residence, with talks by Ewan Atkinson, Sheena Rose, Mark King and Joanna Crichlow, as well as a video presentation by Annalee Davis’ final year fine arts students at BCC. Though they all had varied experiences, suffice to say that being in residency sounds like a vacation of creation. Yes, “creating” can be hard work, but how many of us have the privilege to be a full time artist? Quite a few of us, myself included, are full time clerks-managers-sales reps-whatever and part time when-we-have-the-time artists. Listening to these four artists recant their experiences in residency was inspirational. It made me think of how important “space” is to an artist, and more importantly, how important our space should be to Government and society on a whole.

Artists, in order to all be able to explore, create, inspire and develop our culture, need spaces to inhabit, and there are simply not enough. Thankfully, we have Fresh Milk to continue to nourish our intellects and souls with its food for thought.