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Torika Bolatagici’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

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Melbourne-based Pacific artist Torika Bolatagici shares her first blog post about her Fresh Milk residency. Coming to Barbados with three main goals in mind – to understand the local arts ecology, meet contemporary Barbadian artists and make new work – Torika has spent the first week acclimatizing to both the physical and intangible environment of the country, drawing connections between the region and the Pacific islands and delving into the Colleen Lewis Reading Room to continue her research on contemporary Caribbean art. Read more below:

I am still processing my first week in Barbados. The past 7 days have been a chaotic and exciting mix of books, sweat, introductions, discoveries and breastfeeds in air-conditioned hire cars. Like previous resident Halcyon Macleod, the journey from Australia was a long series of delays and missed connections, and we also lost our portacot. But 7-days in and we’re starting to find our flow here. This week I swam in the Caribbean Sea and dipped my toes in the Atlantic Ocean. I have explored the east coast to Bath Beach and the west coast as far as St. Peter, and I learned a new word – plantocracy.

So, I arrived at Fresh Milk with three main goals; to understand the arts ecology here; meet contemporary Barbadian artists and make new work.

On my first day in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room, Annalee gave me a tour of the collection. It was so wonderful to finally be able to read publications I have only seen from afar including the early issues of ARC Magazine, Pictures from Paradise and See Me Here. ARC magazine was the main influence when I initiated the publication Mana Motu for the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival in Australia. I have admired the work of Fresh Milk from a distance for some time and am eager to know more about how the space has developed and to find out more about arts education here.

I have a thing for Reading Rooms and art libraries. In 2011 I spent a couple of weeks at the Stuart Hall library at the Institute of International Visual Arts. As a result of that experience, I created the pop-up Community Reading Room in Melbourne, using my own collection. When I found out (via ARC) about the Colleen Lewis Reading Room Residency, I knew immediately that it was a space I wanted to engage with.

I have spent my first week getting acquainted with the collection in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room, in an effort to understand the development of the local arts ecology. The collection is incredible, and during my 4 week residency, I will just be able to scratch the surface.

Some of the main texts I have been looking at this week are:

  • Art in Barbados: What Kind of Mirror Image?
  • Caribbean Distpatches: Beyond the Tourist Dream
  • Caribbean: Crossroads of the World
  • Curating in the Caribbean
  • Developing Blackness: Studio Photographs of “Over the Hill”: Nassau in the Independence Era
  • How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness
  • Paulo Nazareth
  • Pictures from Paradise
  • See Me Here

I came to Barbados with a desire to identify points of connection, overlap and departure between the island cultures of Barbados and Fiji. There was an instant feeling of familiarity stepping into the thick humidity of Grantley Adams International airport last Saturday, and although I travel frequently to Fiji, I think it has taken me a week to acclimatize to Barbadian heat. Annalee and Katherine, have made me (and my family) feel so welcome at Fresh Milk and I look forward to chatting with them about their respective practices.  Another highlight has been meeting local artist Anisah Wood, whose work I find compelling.

Anisah and I spent Day 2 getting to know each other and our conversation covered matters of indigeneity and belonging; deculturation, transculturation  and assimilation; migration; climate change; national identity; local politics; Indonesia and West Papua ; The Dominican Republic and Haiti; foreign investment and student loans. I’m learning so much from Anisah, including how to play the game warri as a part of her Quid Pro Quo residency outreach and I’m looking forward to seeing how the next 3 sessions unfold. I’ll be leading a session in the final week of my residency.

And so I am discovering that there are some obvious similarities between Fiji and Barbados. Colonial history. Indentured labour. A sugar industry. Tourism. Rum. Protex. Mahogany. Coconut water. Expats. Poverty. At the moment I am reading more about the military history of Barbados. One thing that frames my experience of Fiji, is the overt presence of militarism. My practice-based PhD explored the spaces in which the dialectics of race, embodiment, masculinity, globalisation, militarism, colonialism and agency meet, diverge and collide in a Fijian context. So I am intrigued by the size and invisibility of the Barbados Defence Force… this is an area I want to explore further in the coming weeks…

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AusCo

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Anisah Wood’s Residency – Week 1 Blog Post

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Recipient of the ‘My Time’ Local Residency 2016, Anisah Wood, shares her first blog post about her time on the Fresh Milk platform. Using this residency as an introduction to the wider art world after completing her BFA at Barbados Community College earlier this year, Anisah has gotten off to a positive start, using the Colleen Lewis Reading Room for research, connecting with fellow resident, Pacific artist Torika Bolatagici, and leading the first session of her Quid Pro Quo skills exchange programme. Read more below:

Showers of blessing.
The studio & Colleen Lewis Reading Room.

As a recent graduate, entering the art arena can seem quite daunting. While some prefer to plunge right in, my preference was to wet my feet first and make gradual strides into deep end of this art world. And they literally got wet on the first day of my My Time Local Residency at Fresh Milk by the torrential rain that drenched the island. Showers of blessing they call it, ringing in the island’s rainy season and my first residency.

During the days that followed I enjoyed making use of the Colleen Lewis Reading Room in my search for inspiration. Another joy was meeting Torika Bolatagici and her wonderful family. As she relayed to me the ins and outs of her home country and the Pacific Islands I was intrigued by the striking similarities between that region and the Caribbean. Another highlight of the week was the first session of the Quid Pro Quo skills exchange. For that session, I shared my knowledge of the game warri and photography. I must admit that I was a bit anxious about taking on the role of host for this session, and about providing a fair exchange of information. However, based on the feedback, the session went well *phew* and I was glad to make two new acquaintances from very diverse backgrounds. I eagerly look forward to informative exchanges over the upcoming weeks.

Quid Pro Quo skills exchange
Learning about warri at the Quid Pro Quo skills exchange
Photo by Anisah Wood.

Now that I have settled in I am hoping for an increase in momentum and intensify my work production. I am intrigued to see how a change in location will inform my work. These next few weeks will be exciting as I make my way to the deep end of the art arena.

Alex Kelly’s Residency – Week 3 Blog Post

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Trinbagonian artist Alex Kelly shares a third blog post about his Fresh Milk residency, which took place earlier this year in March. Looking at his last night in Barbados, spent liming with some of the people he encountered while in the island, Alex reflects on some of the collective aspects of the Caribbean experience he has noticed, and the fine line between comforting familiarity and complacency around regional issues. Read more below:

It’s the last lime before I leave Barbados. I’m having a chat with my Bahamian flatmate and her friend, a fellow Bahamian who’s lived in Barbados since she was a child. There is a bowl of chips and two bowls of dip on the coffee table in front of us. A fly lands on one of the chips and begins to survey the bowl. We continue having our conversation.

Someone gets up and, paying no attention to the fly, takes a chip out of the bowl, scoops up some dip and returns to their seat to enjoy. The fly has of course exited the conversation at this point, but that just happened, and we all let it. In that moment, I once again felt strangely at home in Barbados.

It’s not that we’re particularly fond of flies in TT, in fact I’m sure that the average person, including myself on another day, would have hastily gotten rid of the fly before it could ever desecrate the surface of a single chip; we love we belly. But there was something so unpretentious and confident about the imagined Caribbean that I learned to appreciate, and while on an average day I feel that I am constantly surrounded by actors playing out a role or as Chang might have said, artists more interested in their title than in the work, in that moment I saw an image of that Caribbean. No one pretended to be offended by the presence of that fly.

I am aware that this is an odd and, perhaps for some, off putting example, but I went to Barbados hoping to find a way that my own Caribbean experience could connect to others. I found it yet again in those moments. In that interaction, I was reminded of all the tension that I experience in my work; a practice that examines a way of life that is deeply troublesome and often dangerous, but one that is full of little subversions that make life so much more beautifully subtle and complex.

The frightening question that I am now comforted by, after having been reminded that it is our breaking of the rules that often makes life so nice, is how does a people manage to keep their beautiful conversation going, with that fly still in the bowl, and yet avoid all of the horrors associated with its kind. I believe that we can find a better way, but I’m not sure that I ever want that way to include fussing over a bowl of imported chips. What doh kill does fatten.

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Tridium

This residency is supported by Tridium Caribbean Limited

Sonia Farmer’s Residency – Week 4 Blog Post

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Bahamian artist and writer Sonia Farmer shares her fourth and final blog post about her residency at Fresh Milk, which took place during March. Continuing her creative journey after the residency – which marked the beginning of a series of new adventures, including a recent workshop hosted by San Diego Book Arts – Sonia looks back on her time in Barbados, realizing that the ideas planted here will continue to grow organically; not tied to a physical space, but to an ongoing process of discovery and dismantling of experiences. Read more here:

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Just as my time flew by in Barbados, so has the time on my journey post-Barbados. Being my first residency, I was not sure what to expect, but I did believe I had a lot of time at my disposal…which wasn’t entirely true. That is the lesson I’ll carry to any future residencies: you don’t have all the time you think you do while you are there. But—at least in this instance—the piece doesn’t exactly have to live within the confines of the residency itself.

I am barely halfway through my erasure project of Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes. I harbored some anxiety about finishing the entire erasure within the environment of its origin, but I also knew the desire was unrealistic, given my major commitment to teach a four part workshop during my time there, which took up half of my studio time overall.

But this desire to start and finish the text within Barbados was unrealistic in another way too, which has been revealed to me as I continue to visit the text on trains and buses moving through landscapes just as unknown to me as the island: the poem I am culling from this text so concerned with establishing a sense of place in fact removes that recognizable place. Or perhaps, more accurately, its underlying anxiety to locate place drives an obsessive challenge to interrogate that very idea, dismantling it not necessarily for reconstruction but rather for dismantling’s sake, the very unsettling result the actual desired result:

“But being here a prisoner
is the greatest art
that I am exactly made for”

There is a loose narrative, a voice that belongs sometimes to a traveller, sometimes with a companion, and other times belongs to a collective. Place, time and body collapse and expand, melt away and come into focus, but remain always in an abstract, deconstructed and unsettled state. I’m enjoying the little insights this provides into our historical foundation and current realities in the Caribbean space. It makes me think about what I said it week one, that visiting other Caribbean spaces is like an exercise in magical realism—this text is the written experience of that feeling, a constant rush of déjà vu.

I think it is appropriate to continue this exploration as I myself remain an explorer for these next few months, finding refuge in the strange but also exciting nature of this act even outside of the Caribbean. Because I’m still captivated by this idea, the in-progress poem and its imagery became my subject during a three day workshop in San Diego, ‘Sketch Book Stitch’, taught by Cas Holmes and hosted by San Diego Book Arts.

Less about creating a finished product and more about encouraging experimentation, the class helped to break open my obsessions with Ligon’s text and the themes I’m exploring in the erasure. I brought together decorative papers, found imagery, maps, and Ligon’s own drawings to create mixed media collages that respond to the poem. Just like the poem, these pieces are in no way finished, but they have allowed me to keep dig deeper into this project began at Fresh Milk. I think I’m gaining clarity on another theme that interests me while I deconstruct this text and also visit other spaces, which is how violence plays into the physical and social formation of landscape, and how violence inflicted upon one ties into the other. That definitely came out in the imagery, and I’m still turning it over in my head. We will have to see how it plays out.

I’d like to take this last opportunity to thank Fresh Milk for such a life changing experience. This residency has helped me tap back into my creativity with confidence and playfulness. I have been so fortunate to meet some incredible creative thinkers while there and also light a fire for book arts through my class. After our last class together, many of my students seemed pleased with the course. They walked away with many book structures to explore through their own creative practices, and we left three collaborative books in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room as a tribute to our time together. I’m so proud of them and I hope they continue to explore the craft! Thank you, Fresh Milk, for giving me the opportunity to teach again.

I’m at a rare rest moment in a months-long nomadic journey, but soon I’ll pack my bag and head to the next city on a train or bus, discovering new landscapes and their strange histories, carrying the voice of the narrator inside of me:

“I suffer to remain

Saint of a wild
mad land”

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Sonia Farmer’s Residency – Week 3 Blog Post

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Sonia Farmer writes about her third week in residence at Fresh Milk. Continuing her erasure poetry project using the text ‘A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes’ by Richard Ligon while conducting her own exploration of the island, she contemplates the loaded act of ‘discovery’ and the implications it carries. She also shares the outcome of the challenging but successful third week of her book-binding workshop ‘The Art of the Book‘, which saw the students begin to create their own hardcover notebooks and leather journals. Read more here: 

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Lives in and out of the studio are converging in interesting ways given my chosen project. I’m still working my way through an erasure of A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes by Richard Ligon, but also discovering more of the island myself. The week began with thrilling visits to Harrison’s Cave, Hunte’s Gardens, and Bathsheba, all self navigated with a car rental rather than a pre-arranged tour. We became dreadfully lost on the way to the cave, got soaked in one of those short-lived island downpours in the gardens, and found our recommended lunch place closed due to construction with dangerously low blood sugar levels—but we could say we had a pretty fantastic adventure. Similarly, I’m reconnecting with a Bahamian friend who lives here in Barbados. When she asks what I would like to do around the island, I answer, “Anything.” I’m hungry to see and do it all.

These moments bring out the romantic in me, even though I know all too well the often-frustrating realities of island living and rolling stone travel. But just as I felt during our Week One island tour, exploring a new space is a thing of wonder and an entirely individual experience, something that I am trying to honor and witness in my personal journey as well as my creative practice. I want to be an explorer, not only of physical space, but emotional space too—to study how we meet new experiences with both head and heart.

Is discovery the endgame? Discovery is a problematic word for me, but one that I have been turning over in my head as I think about what it means to write “a true and exact history” of anything: the weighty privilege of it, the naiveté, the narcissism, the violence, all inherent in that word as we have learned it, especially in the Caribbean. We all know the story: In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Good for him. Not so great for others. Because we know that no place can be “discovered” that has already existed in the minds and hearts of others. What maybe can be discovered is something entirely individual and emotional, found on an inward journey while on the outward journey, and that discovery is completely personal. The “true and exact history” of the world as we have learned it is a myth. I don’t think discovery is an endgame here. Exploration and deconstruction, perhaps.

Because when I revisit this historical text by Richard Ligon, a man who, by his privilege, has found a spot in this island’s history, I am interested in deconstructing and reconstructing through the act of exploration. I’m drawn to finding a new narrative within the existing narrative, one that touches upon emotional landscape. And one that honors the fact that if I had approached the text on any other given year, or day, or hour, I could pick up on a completely different set of words and perspective. And that would be true for any other person I hand the text over to.

So I don’t want to think about the history of discovery, I want to think about the discovery of history. I want to think about the act of exploring. I want to explore what we carry and what we choose to include vs. what we overlook and what we choose to leave out. I want to think about the fragility of the moment in the process of choosing one story over the other, and why we are drawn to that. I want to think about making space and leaving room. I want to think about the stories we tell ourselves when we only have one version of history to work from, and how we can still find power and wonder and self-discovery in that. Or not. I have my own set of privileges guiding my through the process behind this project. So overall, I want to keep it personal, because there is no true and exact history.

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Meanwhile, setting aside the 24 hours I thought I was coming down with a flu but somehow gained strength from a fantastically indulgent meal at Chefette, my students crushed week three of our workshop when they sewed their first multi-signature text blocks to create two different blank notebooks. One will be an exposed-stitch hardcover, while the other will be cased into leather for a travel-notebook. As usual, I was completely too ambitious within my given time-frame, even though we extended the class by an hour. Luckily, week 4 is a catch-up class as well as a fun final class, so we will case in our notebooks, revisit a group project, and then make some quick fun book structures. Also luckily, they all had a blast even though I know it was a very challenging class and I couldn’t split myself into three people to assist everyone, but they passed with flying colors. I’m so proud of them!