Quid Pro Quo: Skills Exchange Programme at Fresh Milk

June 1, 2016June 1, 2016Leave a comment

The winner of this year’s Fresh Milk ‘My Time’ Local Residency, Anisah Wood, will be in residence with us between June 6 and July 1, 2016. As part of her community outreach during her residency, Anisah will be offering the programme Quid Pro Quo – a series of skill-exchanges at the Fresh Milk studio.

Modeled after the Trade School concept, founded in part by New York based artist Caroline Woolard whose practice “explores intersections between art and the solidarity economy,” these sessions will become a non-traditional space of learning and sharing, emphasizing the value of people’s passions and skills.

Quid Pro Quo will be held at Fresh Milk over a period of four weeks, with the first session being held on Friday, June 10, 2016 at 3:00pm.

The programme will be structured as follows:

Each participant must be willing to share either one’s passion, skills or knowledge in exchange for the skills or knowledge of the other participants.

Each participant can offer an option of 2 to 3 topics or skills. For example, Anisah will offer: ‘Digital photography 101’, ‘The art of collage’ and ‘How to play warri and potta (traditional board games)’. Note that what is offered does not have to be art oriented. The idea is simply to share knowledge with the expectation of receiving knowledge in exchange.

The result is at most a 4 for 1 exchange.

The setting in which the information is dispensed will be informal and the manner in which each participant relays the information is completely up to the individual. It can be a discussion, hands on experience, a series of exercises, a presentation etc.

Each participant will select from the options offered what they would like to know from the other participants. The option that receives the most votes will be the one discussed.

Finally, each participant will be assigned a day in which they will give their presentation, with the option of Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Fridays with flexible hours between 3:00-6:00 pm.

There will be a limited number of participants approximately 4-5 in order to allow the exchange to be completed within the duration of the residency.

How to register:

To register, email freshmilkbarbados@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Quid Pro Quo’ and provide your name, contact information and the knowledge to be bartered in exchange for one of the skill-sets Anisah will be offering by June 7, 2016.

From the response, the participants will be selected and informed of their acceptance by June 9, 2016, in time for the initial session on June 10 at 3:00 pm.

During this meeting, each of the participants will be assigned a week from which they will determine what day and time they will be hosting their session. The participants will then vote on the focus of each session based on the options provided.

Maj Hasager & Ask Kæreby – Week 3 Blog Post

November 24, 2015November 24, 2015Leave a comment

Danish artists Maj Hasager and Ask Kæreby reflect on the third week of their Fresh Milk residency. They continued their public outreach programming and visiting each coast of the island to record the varying sounds of the ocean, as well as their investigation into the country’s complex history. Trips to loaded sites such as Gun Hill Signal Station and St. Nicholas Abbey raised questions not only about the island’s past, but how it is presented and reckoned with in contemporary society. Read more below:

Sugar cane flowers

Falling into the rhythm of spending a quiet Monday in the studio. Ask is giving an artist talk at Barbados Community College (BCC) today, and gets interesting questions in return. The quiet morning turns into an unrhythmical dance with different institutions in the Barbadian system. Nothing moves forward and I (Maj) am almost bursting with impatience. It seems like there is a lot of historical footage that is stuck in the back of government archives, and not accessible at all. Someone mentions over the phone that all the material prior to the independence in 1966 belongs to the British government, and every year the Barbadian government purchases some of its past… colonial powers apparently linger on when negotiating heritage.

Monday at the studio

Studio buddies

Ask giving an artist talk at BCC

Maj speaking with the students at BCC

Lime at Tiki Bar

Tuesday morning is Maj’s second teaching session at Barbados Community College (BCC) – a failed Internet connection at the college leads to an improvised session anchored in conversation and text on paper with a group of very engaged students. Connections are made between critique, history from below and individual praxes, and opening even more layers in the complexity of place, authorship and subjectivity. Tuesday evening is spent at Tiki Bar at Accra beach for a Fresh Milk lime, where artist Alicia Alleyne, Therese Hadchity, Annalee Davis, Katherine Kennedy, Natalie McGuire, Ask and Maj all meet – as well as director of the national trust Lennox Honychurch who comes by with his laptop to share his research on the Panama canal.

Annalee’s map to Gun Hill

Gun Hill Signal Station

The view from Gun hill

Maj Photographing Gun Hill

Gun Hill Map

Gun Hill

Landscape view

An abandoned structure

We can see one of the former signal stations in Barbados – named Gun Hill – from where we live. On a small hill top the red building seems far away. When we finally look at a map the distance is less than two km, and it becomes the morning walk up the steep hill – really appreciating the clouds’ mercy as we are making our way to the top. The view from the top is indeed splendid, and we have been told the Barbados National Trust is also trying to make use of the site for weddings and other special occasions, but we wonder who would want a backdrop such as this, which was built primarily to alert in case of more slave uprisings, two years after the 1816 revolt. Adding insult to injury, enslaved labour was also used during the construction of the signal station, and the British West India Regiments bought slaves to supplement their normal recruiting until 1807, when slave trade was abolished in the British Empire – though outside of the army, slavery itself was upheld until 1838.

Sound workshop Session II

The week slowly disappears – halfway through we visit more museums in Bridgetown, and Thursday Ask holds the second sound workshop, which adds to the layers of last weeks conversation. At dusk when we leave the studio at Fresh Milk. The colour palette of the landscape suddenly has similarities with old paintings of the Danish landscape. An odd sense of overlapping moments and time appears as the daylight fades.

Bus trip

Sound measurement on the bus

Inside the cave

Animal flower cave view

Maj and the hydrophone in the animal flower cave

The bus route 1A seems to have vanished into thin air, forcing us to reshuffle our tightly packed daytrip schedule on Friday. After 3 hours of rumbling we reach the north most part of the island and visit the beautiful site of Animal Flower Cave, named after the sea anemones that live there. It’s still quiet so we get a personal tour of the area from Don – including a climb down (and back up) the cliffs to immerse the hydrophone, which we later take out in the waters of the West Coast, completing its travel to the four corners of this microcosm.

Ask, Don and the hydrophone

Maj photographing

West Coast

Ask and the hydrophone

It is noon and the sun is merciless as we are waiting for the bus in an attempt to find alternative routes to reach the old sugar plantation of St. Nicholas Abbey in the parish of St. Peter – which is rumoured to present a somewhat controversial interpretation of colonial history. The bus never shows up, but instead a kind person is offering us a ride back to Speightstown. It turns out that the driver is the artist Victor Collector, who is known for his realist landscape paintings of Barbados. Somehow he has been documenting the changes of the Bajan Landscape over the past twenty years, and on our way back to the city he stops along the way to describe the changes in the landscape, and how it looked when he painted different sites. He leaves us in Speightstown, and we manage to get across to St. Nicholas Abbey just in time to get a tour of the house. Almost through the tour, we are both baffled by the fact that there hardly is any mention of slavery.

St. Nicholas Abbey

Colonial Nightmare

Colonial Nightmare II

When we raise it with the owner who happens to suddenly appear, he dismisses the lack of addressing slavery in their official tour by saying the world is built on exploitation, and that he is the descendant of white indentured labour in Barbados. Our claim is then why not take this as the point of departure to discuss the conflicted and colonial history, instead of whitewashing the present by only describing the architecture and current production, relegating any mention of slavery to witty subtleties from the tour guides? The film claimed to demonstrate the history of the plantation is a 1935 home video, with a voice over from 2000 that is so completely devoid of any sensitivity towards the past or the present, let alone empathy, that we are left dazed and frustrated from the deadpan voice, worthy of an auctioneer at a fish market.

We walk across the fields of the sugar plantation as the daylight fades – to catch another bus to continue our journey.

Bus to city

Bridgetown on a Saturday

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This residency is supported in part by the Danish Arts Foundation

Jordan Clarke’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

March 30, 2015May 21, 2015Leave a comment

Barbadian-Canadian painter Jordan Clarke shares her first blog post about her Fresh Milk residency. In addition to familiarizing herself with Barbados, which she has never visited before, Jordan shares some of her thoughts on grappling with notions of identity and belonging in an environment that is both a part of her heritage yet still a foreign space. Read more below:

I cannot believe it’s been almost a week since I arrived in Barbados.

Shortly after landing on Monday we headed over to Fresh Milk where Annalee gave a lecture to a couple art students from the University of the West Indies. The lecture was a great introduction to the Caribbean and its art scene. We were introduced to the various informal art networks happening throughout the Caribbean such as Alice Yard (Trinidad), Popopstudios (Bahamas), Tembe Art Studios (Suriname), NLS (Jamaica), Beta Local (Puerto Rico), Instituto Buena Bista (Curacao), and Ateliers ’89 (Aruba).

Jordan Clarke standing by Mark King's 'Untitled Grid Fields'

Annalee referenced the book, An Eye For The Tropics by Krista Thompson, to discuss how tropicalization has developed throughout the Caribbean, and how the image alone has been used as a tool in creating this inaccurate idea of a ‘tropical paradise’. It seems that these networks are creating platforms for contemporary artists to be able to experiment and to exchange ideas, while providing safe spaces to foster self-expression.

Both Annalee and Katherine have pointed out various books from the Colleen Lewis Reading Room they thought would be of interest to my art practice.

See Me Here: A Survey of Contemporary Self Portraiture From The Caribbean really stood out for me because I am also dealing with self-portraiture in my work. It’s interesting to see how Caribbean artists are examining, exploring and expressing their identity.

Thinking The Diaspora: Home Thoughts From Abroad by Stuart Hall, was suggested to me after an insightful conversation I had with Annalee about feeling disconnected from Barbados. Because I am mixed race and have a Barbadian father I thought I would feel more at home. But the truth is, I don’t. So once again I’m continuing to question my identity. I am coming to the realization that this is okay!

I was fortunate enough to visit Bathsheba with Aaron Kamugisha who is a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies. We drove along the rugged East Coast with a stop at St. John’s Parish Church, one of the oldest in Barbados. Looking out from the church was a breathtaking view of the Atlantic Ocean. I also made a visit to Rockley Beach in Christ Church with Annalee. It was an absolutely beautiful evening walking while listing to the rolling waves, after which we headed over to Mojos for dinner, drinks and to meet with local artists Katherine Kennedy, Versia Harris, and Mark King, who I got to meet for the first time.

In addition to sightseeing I’ve been spending a lot of time in the studio. I’m really enjoying just being in this wonderful space that is full of natural light and which also provides a fresh cooling breeze. I began my week with sketching various plants growing around the Fresh Milk space. On Friday I began to work with oil paints on mylar paper. I’m finding the drying time to be a bit slower than what I would like at this point. So in the coming days I will be exploring other mediums such as graphite, charcoal and oil pastels.

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This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

Kara Springer’s Residency – First Blog Post

December 8, 2014May 21, 20151 Comment

One of Fresh Milk’s current resident artists, Toronto based industrial designer and visual artist Kara Springer, shares her first blog post about her time working in Barbados:

One week into our residency at Fresh Milk, and I’m already longing for more time here. It’s such a gift to have access to the beautiful Fresh Milk studio and library. Christian and I are exploring the island in my uncle’s car, scouting locations for my installation series, tentatively titled Repositioned Objects. Lately I’ve been thinking about my preoccupation with decay and erosion, which is in some way or another present in all of my work. It’s this very particular thing in the Caribbean – the way that structures can come apart, and literally crumble; the elements are always intimately and intensely present. I built the 6’x6′ cube below in a burned-out shop in Bridgetown this week. The shop is in the midst of being rebuilt so I had this brief window of time (24 hours) to build, photograph, and ultimately disassemble the piece. I was immediately drawn to the industrial quality of the space – carrying the traces of what it used to be and the questions of how it fell into disrepair, even in its current state of being prepped for re-construction.

Repositioned Objects Series. Photograph by Kara Springer.

In contrast, two weeks ago, just as the temperature dropped below freezing in Toronto, I installed the form below, which was originally inspired by a roti hut, in an industrial parking lot at Keele & St Clair. I had to trek into the store nearby every 10 minutes or so to thaw my hands as I put it together. This residency is affording me a really valuable space to think through what it means to be of and from many different places, and the translations that are negotiated in the in-between.