Brazilian artist Danilo Oliveira shares his second blog post about his Fresh Milk residency this month. Danilo will be documenting his experiences through a visual diary, sharing images and sketches that capture impressions of his time here. See more below:
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Fresh Milk is pleased to welcome Brazilian artist Danilo Oliveira and British-Barbadian poet & artist Dorothea Smartt to the platform for the month of November, 2016.
Danilo’s recent work has focused on ways to engage with the idea, sensation and political concept of the border. Border defines identity, defines quality of life and shapes definitions of the future. Contemporary relationships with borders have two key aspects: abstractly, we have no more boundaries between us due to globalization; on the other hand, questions around borders have never been so relevant as they have in the last decades, in addition to all of the symbolic borders we encounter in our everyday life.
During this residency, he will be continuing his ongoing project ‘About Invented Borders’, by investigating borders in Barbadian and Caribbean society, looking at the history of the region and exploring its ties to Central America. Through research, his concept involves discussing the relationships people have with the boundaries around them and the collective memories of communities towards these borders; whether political, “official” borders or more complex, inner borders and barriers specific to different areas or cultures.
The project will include producing a series of drawings and installation work containing several invented maps drawings, made randomly in response to Danilo’s time in Barbados. The amount of drawings will vary according the spacial and temporal possibilities.
Dorothea’s work typically bridges the islands of Britain and Barbados, effortlessly shuttling between local and global scenes, as it weaves a diasporic web. She has two full collections, Connecting Medium [2001, Peepal Tree Press] and Ship Shape [2008, PTP]. In the latter, ‘a powerful work of reclamation, restitution and reanimation’ [Wasafiri] she offers a name and imagined life to the African buried in Samboo’s Grave, Lancaster.
Her latest chapbook, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On, serves as a precursor to her ongoing research towards new live-art work and her third full poetry collection. She aims to continue reworking standard narratives, this time imagining same-sex relationships and cross-gender experiences in the early 1900’s among ‘West Indian’ workers on the Panama Canal.
Dorothea’s Fresh Milk residency will afford her an opportunity to play and create in a safe, welcoming space. She wishes to work towards creating a multimedia performance reflecting the internationalism of the Panama Canal construction, perhaps collaborating with artists she met during her time in Panama and other artists in Barbados. She will explore the possibility of a collaborative scratch performance, incorporating media such as Skype and PowerPoint presentations with live performance.
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Photo by Natalia Garcia
About Danilo Oliveira:
Danilo Oliveira is an artist, curator and professor based in Sao Paulo, Brazil:
“The last 17 years I’ve been working in various mediums: painting, drawing, muralism, graphic arts, conceptual and community based works. Especially connected to the idea of collective practice, I founded the group Ocavalo in 1999, and Base-V (base-v.org) collective in 2003, working in a few groups since then. Besides the lonely work at the studio when I’m painting, it’s the social insertion that is always the final goal, even for the paintings. Every artwork is a form of relation. The muralism and other works which expanded in the given space, have played a central role in my production. Now, even my canvas paintings only exist when articulated in the space: glued, nailed, stretched, tied. My curatorial practice works the same way: collective, seeking inclusion and with no artistic boundaries. I’m interested both in contemporary and “popular”, folk or ancestral productions and views on culture and art.”
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About Dorothea Smartt:
Dorothea Smartt has an international reputation as a respected poet, live artist, and literary activist. Born and raised in London, with Barbadian heritage, she has two full collections, Connecting Medium and Ship Shape [Peepal Tree Press]. Her recent chapbook, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On, “…is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic…”. She was awarded an Attached Live Artist residency at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts, an Arts Council of England One-to-One live art development award, and most recently their Grants For All as an independent artist.
Over the past twenty-five years, her credits include engagements with the British Council in Bahrain, South Africa, USA, Egypt, and Hungary. Her seminal work “Medusa? Medusa Black!”, was cited as an O.B.E [Outstanding Black Example) of British live art. Other works include: “Triangle” [A Black Arts Alliance commission, with Kevin Dalton Johnson], exploring generations of UK Blacklesbian & Blackgay lives. “Tradewinds/Landfall”, an international cross-arts residency, exhibited in Houston, Texas and the Museum of London Docklands. In 2013 she was keynote speaker at Barbados’ Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award.
She is currently researching a new work, to culminate in a third full poetry collection. In it she continues to rework standard narratives. This time imagining cross-gender experiences, same-sex relationships, and the role of traditional religion/spirituality in sustaining the ‘West Indian’ workforce constructing the Panama Canal, in the early 1900’s.
She is a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, Programme Manager of Inscribe (Peepal Tree’s writer development programme), and Associate Poetry Editor at SABLE Litmag. In 2016 she was honoured with a nomination for a Barbados Golden Jubilee Award, and her collection Ship Shape proposed as an ‘A’ Level English Literature text.
Kingston-based curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson has been selected for this year’s Tilting Axis curatorial fellowship. Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, who has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection.
Congratulations, Nicole!
The curatorial fellowship is a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meetings in 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados and in 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Scotland based cultural partners CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery, Hospitalfield and curatorial collective Mother Tongue produced a structural long-term fellowship for an emerging contemporary art practitioner living and working in the Caribbean.
This new fellowship opportunity focuses on the development of pragmatic and critical curatorial development hailing from the Caribbean region, and is research and practice-led, and mentor-based. Designed as a year-long programme between the Caribbean region and Scotland, it offers support for critical development of curatorial practice and gives a practical base in the partner institutions with visits to Scotland and throughout the Caribbean.
During the fellowship, Nicole Smythe-Johnson will travel to Scotland in November, and will also undertake research visits to Suriname, Barbados, Cuba and Grenada. Smythe-Johnson said: “I am very excited about the fellowship. I attended the Tilting Axis conference this year in Miami and really savoured the opportunity to meet other arts professionals and hear about other institutions in the Caribbean region. I love my island, but island life can be isolating and there is a real temptation toward the insular. This fellowship then, is the perfect opportunity to build on the connections I made at TA 2016, and get some answers to the questions that came out of that experience. I can’t wait to jump in with both feet, starting with Glasgow.”
David Codling, Director of Arts for the Americas, British Council said: “In so many ways which are often overlooked, the Caribbean is the epicentre of the Americas: for better or worse Europe’s involvement with what it called the “New World” began in the Caribbean and for many European countries, including the four nations of the UK, our relationship with the Caribbean is deep, intense and complex. The British Council is proud to support and to be associated with the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship which offers an opportunity to explore and understand that relationship and to promote new conversations.”
Holly Bynoe, co-founder, Tilting Axis said: “In keeping with the notion of tilting the axis which refers to the re-focusing of our gaze and harnessing our collective power to make the visual arts sector more sustainable in ways that resonate with our lived realities in the Caribbean, the introduction of the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship is one example of how this might happen. Tilting Axis 2: Caribbean Strategies made significant strides in its aims to fortify networks and extend the reach of the arts throughout the Caribbean, with its partners in the Global North. I am delighted that the inaugural fellow is Nicole Smythe-Johnson and eagerly anticipate what will come of her research across the Dutch, Spanish, and Anglophone Caribbean, concluding in what I am sure will be a rich and stimulating experience in Scotland.”
The fellowship is in partnership with CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery and Studios, Hospitalfield, Mother Tongue and Tilting Axis. Supported by the British Council.
For more information, images or interviews, please contact Julie Cathcart, Communications Manager, CCA – julie@cca-glasgow.com / 0141 352 4911.
About Nicole Smythe-Johnson:
Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, living in Kingston, Jamaica. She has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection.
About CCA:
The Centre for Contemporary Arts is Glasgow’s hub for the arts. The building is steeped in history and the organisation has played a key role in the cultural life of the city for decades. CCA’s year-round programme includes cutting-edge exhibitions, film, music, literature, spoken word, festivals, Gaelic language events and performance. CCA also provides residencies for artists in the on-site Creative Lab space, as well as working internationally on residencies with Palestine, the Caribbean and Quebec. CCA curates six major exhibitions a year, presenting national and international contemporary artists, and is home to Intermedia Gallery showcasing emerging artists.
About Hospitalfield:
Dedicated to contemporary art and ideas, Hospitalfield is a place to work, study, learn, visit and enjoy. Hospitalfield is an artist’s house in Arbroath, on the east coast of Scotland, with a captivating cultural and social history that spans many hundreds of years. The contemporary arts programme is anchored in the visual art yet encourages interdisciplinarity, supporting the production of new work and providing space for debate and learning through residencies, a summer school and four public projects with new commissions each year. The organisation maintains strong national and international working partnerships with the aim of making Hospitalfield a meeting place and cultural catalyst in the working lives of artists, students and creative professionals in Scotland and far beyond.
About Mother Tongue:
Mother Tongue is a research-led, independent curatorial practice formed by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden. Since 2009, they have produced exhibitions, screening programmes, discursive events, essays and texts, working in partnership with galleries, museums, festivals, and publishers. Mother Tongue’s practice in exhibition-making intersects with research interests – including, but not limited to – post-colonialism, language, translation, heritage, identities, indigenousness, migration, and movement. They are currently researching the presence, work and exhibition histories of artists of colour in Scotland, working towards a future ‘AfroScots’ exhibition project.
About Tilting Axis:
Tilting Axis is a roving project conceptualised by ARC Magazine and the Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. The first iteration was hosted at Fresh Milk in Barbados in February 2015 under the banner Tilting Axis: Within and Beyond the Caribbean | Shifting Models of Sustainability and Connectivity. Tilting Axis 2.0 was hosted by the Pérez Art Museum Miami in February 2016. This meeting explored the current state of cultural work in the Caribbean, and aimed to fortify networks, increase administrative and programming capacities, as well as transfer knowledge and funding opportunities to those working in the region. The Tilting Axis Emerging Curatorial Fellowship developed out of the second iteration and the next edition of the meeting is slated to take place in April 2017, hosted by the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI).
About The British Council:
The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations. The British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide. We call this cultural relations. We build trust and understanding for the UK to create a safer and more prosperous world. In terms of our reach and impact, we are the world’s leading cultural relations organisation. Cultural relations is a component of international relations which focuses on developing people-to-people links and complements government-to-people and government-to-government contact. We use English, Arts, and Education and Society – the best of the UK’s great cultural assets – to bring people together and to attract partners to working with the UK. The British Council has over 7,000 staff working in 191 offices in 110 countries and territories.
Fijian-Australian artist Torika Bolatagici shares her final blog post looking back at her Fresh Milk residency which took place during the month of June. The final week was full of activity, ranging from the public event FRESH MILK XIX, a presentation to delegates in a UNESCO workshop and continuing to meet with artists and members of the creative community, while still finding time to work on her photographic series The Camouflage Act developed in Barbados. Read more from Torika below:
Week 4 began with mine and Anisah’s public presentation on the evening of Monday 27 June. I prepared a presentation to introduce the Barbadian audience to the arts practices of Australian-based artists of the Fijian, Papua New Guinean and Autonomous Region of Bougainville diaspora. My presentation was titled ‘Seeing the Black Pacific’ and focused on drawing out particular themes that emerge from Australian-based artists of Melanesian and Indian-Fijian ancestry. Specifically, Cultural Heritage, Revival and Redress; Julia Mage’au Gray (Papua New Guinea); Lisa Hilli (Papua New Guinea); Dulcie Stewart (Fiji). Performing Contemporary Oceanic Identities: Salote Tawale (Fiji); Eric Bridgeman (Papua New Guinea). Positioning the (Geo)political Pacific: Taloi Havini (Autonomous Region of Bougainville); Mohini Chandra (Fiji); Torika Bolatagici (Fiji). It’s a huge task to condense the work of such diverse artists with significant bodies of work into such a short amount of time, but I hope that those who were able to attend will be able to follow-up on individual artists.
It was a pleasure to chat about Anisah’s work in more depth, in relation to the concepts, motivations and processes behind her previous work, as well as the way she has been developing these ideas further through the residency. Working alongside Anisah has been one of the most rewarding and memorable experiences of my residency and I hope that our paths will cross again in the future.
On the Tuesday of week 4, I led the final session of Anisah’s Quid Pro Quo exchange session, in which I covered some basics about web content and layout for artists. We looked at some fundamentals of information architecture and compared and reviewed some of the various platforms available, before taking a look at the backend of a Squarespace site.
On Wednesday 29 June, we were lucky enough to participate in Katherine Kennedy’s presentation to a group of Caribbean delegates attending a UNESCO workshop that was taking place in Barbados that week. While I was aware of some of the work that the Fresh Milk organisation does, I was amazed at the multiple levels that they are involved in building and supporting the arts and culture industry in Barbados. It was truly amazing to see the grassroots through to international reach of the organisation and the delegates were visibly in awe of the breadth of work being achieved. There were audible gasps and ‘wows’ in the audience. It was an honour to be invited to speak about my residency experience as a part of Katherine’s presentation.
My two final days on the island were packed with multiple (and overlapping) appointments as I hopped from parish to parish trying to squeeze everything in, including photographing friends for my series The Camouflage Act. I was really glad to receive an email from Barbados-based attorney Lalu Hanuman, who wanted to pass on a copy of his publication Reality Check about “the mendacity of those in power in the days of European Colonialism – who propagated cannibal myths (and similar superiority notions), the better to facilitate their plundering activities.” (Hanuman, 2005). Not only was I grateful to Lalu for reaching out and gifting a copy of his book, but I was also pleased to learn about his work as an environmentalist and with the Barbados Marine Trust. I regret not being able to meet Lalu in-person, but was thrilled to learn that on the day he met with my husband to give him the book, he was in court and winning the case against the government’s proposal to introduce fingerprinting at all ports of entry, including for Barbadian nationals entering and leaving the country (more information in the online newspaper Barbados Today here.)
Another highlight of my final week, was meeting Russell Watson and visiting his studio to learn more about his practice. Russell really helped me to understand more about Barbadian history, culture, politics, topography and marine life. I was really struck by his photographic series Phylum, featuring disembodied figures framed by layers of luminous coral that reminded me of Byzantine mosaics.
After a final photoshoot with Sheena Weekes at Fresh Milk on my last day, I took one final drive up to Gallery NuEdge to take a sneak peek at the installation of Quaternary, curated by Natalie McGuire, featuring the work of Sheena Rose, Versia Harris, Llanor Alleyne and Katherine Kennedy. It was wonderful to finally meet Sheena Rose (whose work I have been following for some time) and take a walk through the gallery with each of the artists. The gallery is lovely and the works looked beautiful in the space; ranging from sculpture to digital print, and mixed-media assemblage. An exquisite show!
As we drove back from Holetown to Worthing in the rain with the windows open, the smell of roti filling the mini van and the sound of Skip Marley on the radio, my heart was sad to be leaving, but full of gratitude for all the learning, experiences and friendships formed. Each day as I entered the dairy I passed a sign that read ‘Manipura’ – the solar plexus, the centre of vitality. Symbolised by a downward pointing triangle indicating “the spreading of energy, growth and development.”
Thank you Fresh Milk for providing the space for growth, renewal of energy and development.
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This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Fresh Milk and Fresh Art International are collaborating to present Fresh Talk: Caribbean, a series of podcasts about creativity in the 21st century with a Caribbean focus.
This week’s episode features Cuban artist Glexis Novoa, one of fifty artists that curator Juan Delgado invited to participate in the public art exhibition Detras del muro (Behind the wall) during the 12th Havana Biennial.
Click here to listen to the full podcast.
About Fresh Art International & Fresh Talk:
Mission: To inform and inspire a world of followers, Fresh Art International’s team shares conversations, commentary, news, and views about contemporary art.
Launched in October 2011, Fresh Art International is an evolving independent media outlet with a global point of view. Our website is the virtual platform for Fresh Talk: Conversations About Creativity in the 21st Century, our signature audio podcast. The site welcomes up to 3,000 monthly visitors. Averaging more than 9,000 feed hits monthly, we welcome new friends and followers every day: Facebook (3,000+ Likes and Friends) and Twitter (5,000+ Followers).
For Fresh Talk, independent curator Cathy Byrd meets with contemporary artists, curators, designers, architects, composers, writers, filmmakers and other cultural producers. Listen to conversations directly on this website, download episodes, or subscribe to the series on iTunes and Stitcher. Fresh Talk is also accessible through Public Radio Exchange at prx.org.
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