Union Collaborative – fresh milk barbados

In Fall 2019, Het Nieuwe Instituut joined forces with Tilting Axis to offer a Fellowship to one mid-career or established applicant based in the Caribbean. Barbadian multi-disciplinary designer and architect Israel Mapp has been selected as the recipient of the Tilting Axis /Het Nieuwe Instituut Fellowship 2023. Israel Mapp will begin the Fellowship at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam starting February 2023 and will continue his research and activities through July 2023.

See the announcement on the Tilting Axis website here.

Barbadian multi-disciplinary designer and architect Israel Mapp

Procedure

The fellowship is supported by Het Nieuwe Instituut as lead partner and host, and will include collaborations with its partners, the Amsterdam Museum, De Appel, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Kunstinstituut Melly. By the deadline for the application on May 27th 2022, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Tilting Axis received 9 eligible entries in response to the open call, from eight territories in the Caribbean region: Barbados, Cuba, Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Suriname, The Bahamas, and Trinidad & Tobago.

All the proposals were reviewed by a committee composed of the following members:

Aric Chen, Artistic and General Director, Het Nieuwe Instituut
Setareh Noorani, Researcher, Het Nieuwe Instituut
Iyawo (Holly Bynoe Young), Sour Grass and Tilting Axis co-founder
Annalee Davis, Visual Artist, Founding Director of Fresh Milk, Sour Grass and Tilting Axis co-founder
Jessy Koeiman, Curator Collective Learning, Kunstinstituut Melly
Mark Raymond, Director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa
Huib Haye van der Werf (Interim Director), Director at De Appel
Inez van der Scheer, Junior Curator of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam Museum
Charl Landvreugd, Head of Research and Curatorial Practice, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Submissions and interviews were evaluated based on their ability to present a clear proposal outlining their thinking, projected investigation, and how the fellowship would expand and enrich their practice. Four candidates were shortlisted and invited to an online interview with members of the selection committee on 22nd June 2022. Following the interviews, the committee selected Israel Mapp as the recipient of the 2023 fellowship. The other shortlisted candidates were Dayana Trigo Rames (Cuba), Jorge Pablo Lima (Cuba) and Miguel E. Keerveld (Suriname).

General Comments

The members of the jury were impressed by the spirited and dynamic nature of the projects, as well as the ambition of the applicants. The set of applications showed a variety of working methodologies and media, ranging from installations and architectural designs to the role of curating as an artist and various forms of social, political and symbolic public engagements and activism.

The jury was pleased to have received applications from applicants based across three linguistic territories of the Caribbean. Submissions responded to urgent themes including the climate emergency, colonialism, social consciousness, material cultures and architectural innovations found in nature, histories and literature.

The shortlisted projects investigated the nature of pathology in design, knowledge building within collective and co-creative practices, the role of architecture within ecology and embodied knowledge along with exploring non-extractive material considerations in the era of climate emergency.

Comments on the Selected Proposal

Israel Mapp’s proposal “Above Oceans” was supported unanimously during the interview process because of its considerations around material cultures and their connection to tangible and intangible heritages. The clarity expressed along with his poetic, empathetic and human-led explorations made his exchange with the jury memorable. In addition, Mapp was able to expand on his idea of creative placemaking in a meaningful way connecting several of his unique interests to the strengths of each partner institution.

This opportunity to engage in more intimate and nuanced ways with partner institutions is something that is very attractive to the legacy of the Fellowship. His inquiries and curiosities deal with the very real eco-challenges that are being faced by every Caribbean nation. “Above Oceans” points to material culture as praxis and identity and the urgency around forming community and institutional support using generative, open and humanist value systems.

His ambition includes embracing new learning through the introduction of labs which will create a growing reference library and continued opportunity to develop resources that can bring more wholeness and unification to the creative landscape of Barbados through exchange and co-ideation/co-creation. Collectively the jury was thrilled by Mapp’s interest in reworking clay, fibres from native flora, and limestone found in colonial architectural forms, and in re-presenting these materials in ways that will engage in an ethos connected to a regenerative circular design, that will involve creating more adaptive spaces that embody unlearning and transformation for these urgent times.

On receiving the news that he had been awarded the fellowship, Mapp shared this statement with the jury:

“Above Oceans is not the beginning, it is a point along an exploratory journey for me recognizing and acknowledging how landscape influences Barbadian identity. I truly enjoyed developing the “Above Oceans” proposal for the Tilting Axis Fellowship. It was a process of introspection and discovery working towards an alignment of love, joy, my talents and interests, and the needs of community.

I am equally thankful for the Tilting Axis | Het Nieuwe Instituut Team for taking the time and effort to consider, analyze and inquire with interest about Above Oceans. Receipt of critical feedback from one’s peers has always been an empowering experience for me. It often provides multiple and diverse perspectives that one would have not considered, drills down to the details that matter and ultimately adds more value and depth to the initial idea. Good design comes about when good questions are presented. This process with The Jury was insightful, and inspired me to review, refine and develop the proposal with the view to implement in Barbados. They asked great questions.

I am extremely grateful for and accept this gift and opportunity to continue and expand the work I have been doing in Barbados to which the fellowship will provide. It is also one of meaningful exchange, exploration and discovery; experiences that I value and contribute greatly to my work. My practice calls for experimentation and the exploration of the possibilities; working in the creative environment of Rotterdam will be an excellent observatory and laboratory.

The next six months will be critical in the planning of the fellowship beginning 2023. In addition to having access to the resources of Het Nieuwe Instituut, the partnering organisations and building new relationships, I look forward to taking opportunities for research and development, and collaborations towards approaches in architectural-product design routed innately in Barbadian material culture and a parallel track on understanding the development and operations of creative clusters. I look forward to sharing the fellowship and its fruits with my peers across the ocean.”

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Above is a selection of images from Mapp’s work which features:

Architecture: Urban Renewal Project Union at Beckwith Creative Cluster, Bridgetown.
Product Design Homewares: CartoGraphs – surface design of recovered Sukabumi stone tiles and Hot Tea clay tea pot product development.
Product Design Fashion: Flotsam+ Jetsam : Rescued Ocean Objects Reimagines and Hot Tea.

Ark Ramsay shares a blog post about the third week of their Fresh Milk residency, beginning with Barbados’ second Pride Parade organised by Equals Barbados on Sunday, June 30th; punctuated with a midweek visit to Bridgetown to see the developing creative hub Union Collaborative and the exhibition ‘Retro-Future Landscapes‘ by Kraig Yearwood; and ending with the event FRESH MILK XXII: Residency Readings. Read Ark’s poignant thoughts on the intense and challenging week, which required strength and vulnerability to absorb and process both publicly and in private:

Ethan and I celebrating Pride. My sign says “protect the non-beenary baes” with a little bee on it.

I was putting my mouth on the future in my last blog post. When I wrote: the way forward requires that I think about structure–I might as well have said, the way forward requires that I live in a week other than this week.

Sunday was Barbados’ second Pride Parade.

And I don’t want to siphon the joy/abandon/celebration out of that–or sit here and tell you that I did not get on wild and dutty–or claim that the light in me did not flare up at the touch of the light in my Bajan queer family.

And I don’t want to deny ‘bravery’, or ‘resilience’, or ‘beauty’, or ‘at-homedness’.

And I think it ironic that I have to preface the somber and vulnerable with a defense of pageantry. But I do.

Come Monday, sore and filled to the brim with love for this place, I was sitting on the deck at Fresh Milk–video-chatting a queerabian artist-friend who could not be at the parade in person. We started out the same way this blog post started out. In defense of love and glitter. Halfway in, this became untenable.

“Me and belonging just don’t pitch marbles,” they said, as we lamented the long (pothole-filled) road we had taken to arrive at this shifting place. And the cows, chickens, and small dogs all around this farm made effortless song–lampooning our attempts to ground ourselves, or think through the vast human-centeredness of ‘belonging’.

The price paid to dance to “I’m Coming Out” by Dianna Ross in front of Cave Shepherd on Broad Street was (and still is) steep. I pay it every day. All queer Barbadians do. And for some the charge is pulling from a sum they don’t have (and may never have), and whittling away–a slow, drain–until ‘bravery’ is rendered skeletal and impotent.

I volunteer to pay the price, knowing it has to be paid, knowing what’s asked of me is a fraction of a fraction of what is asked of others.

The truth is, all I have to offer is open heart writing surgery, performed on myself. And, the question is not whether it is ‘enough’ (no, possibly not), or whether it can effect change (how egocentric)–what remains is the stubbornness to root through these questions despite their nature–despite the manifold unknowns.

I am reminded this week, after getting back “Cereus Blooms at Night” from Ethan Knowles–and leafing through it–that it appeared for me right when I needed it. I read it when I was nineteen and leaving the island for the first time. I felt then (as I feel now), how unpayable the price of this book must have been, its very existence, the toll it must have taxed out of Shani Mootoo. Her expense is my enrichment, and so the circle of the word continues. I guess all I want to do is pay forward what I was given.

This rambling, guilt-ridden, wishing-I-could-do-more, lamenting-things-as-they-are, swarmed my week. I moved in careful silence, rebuilding what was knocked down, knowing that what was really happening (within me) was the fermentation of things that I could (gratefully) rage back into art–motivated by a Rainer Maria Rilke quote given to me by someone long ago: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves.”

So I repeated that quote like a mantra, knowing it is a rickety bridge from unsurety to unsurety.

At Union Collaborative for a tour of the site

On Tuesday, the whole Fresh Milk family visited “Union Collaborative”, this newly developing hub that seeks to create a space for dialogue and side-by-side creative flow–all within the remnants of a gutted commercial mall.

As Israel Mapp walked us through his vision (fashion designers working across the courtyard from metalworkers and chefs), it seemed like he, and his team, were inexhaustible. That the abundance of love they have for this place, and the whole idea of a revitalized, artistically-thriving Bridgetown, was enough to power the lights. His whole energy seemed to suggest: this is happening with or without anyone else’s input. I was bowled over by the whole enterprise because it was the complete antithesis to the questions that I had been carrying around. It was so rooted, so part-of-things, so not-in-your-own-mindcell.

Yearwood’s work “Aquifer”–inviting us to question the bedrock

Afterwards, we went to Norman Centre, where artist Kraig Yearwood had installed his work “Retro-future Landscapes”. It was right next to a leatherworking stand, and beside the gutted space where a shoe store used to be. Here was this room (fitted for a boutique store), filled with Kraig’s huge pieces rendered from concrete and found items. He cast these objects with the innards of cellphones and plastic detritus–creating these sediment layers that reflect what we may leave behind in the bones of this island. It seems like everyone this week was pondering island, in some form. Who we are, what we build, what we leave behind.

On Thursday, jackhammering at my work (revealing nothing of substance), the rains came. The roof at Fresh Milk is itself a drum–inconsistently played by mahogany pods–but here was this persistent percussion. Annalee (convinced that she practices some sort of Obeah) appeared with “Calling a Wolf a Wolf” by Kaveh Akbar, a book of poems that I’ve been trying to hunt down (or wait to arrive), for years now.

“We all want the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder, like the first man to hear a parrot speak”

Kaveh is an Iranian-American poet, whose work is staggeringly beautiful. In fact, the latter half of this week was about reconnecting with old collections that I treasure and champion (“Everyone Knows I am a Haunting” by Trinidad’s Shivanee Ramlochan), and finally getting to read this work. I was able to put them side-by-side. Their work, so different, yet both so brutal and honest. They both stare it down. They both inhabit ‘bravery’, ‘resilience’, ‘beauty’, and ‘at-homedness’.

I channelled them when I was called upon to perform.

On Friday the trio of residents decided to host an open house, where we would pull from work-in-progress and untested writing. We would essentially give what we had never given before.

I read a short story that I have been carrying with me for years. Every time I changed as a writer, a transformation would be stimulated in my personal life, and I would see a new way into the story. But I had never read it. I had kept it safe, kept it mine.

Sharing it, and then inviting the audience to engage with me afterwards (when I was rawest and shaking), was one of the most rewarding experiences of this entire residency. My Q&A moved from ‘process’ questions into the realm of climate-sorrowing–and because of this–I felt less like I was going through the motions, and more like I was trying to share something I feel deeply kinned to. Less like I was manufacturing something artificial, and more like my soul was on the line.

The trio performing at Fresh Milk

I go into full professor mode at the mention of “climate change”

This is Ethan and Kia’s last week at the residency, and the space will be worse off for their absence. I will miss what was created here (even if it lasted a few weeks), with the strange interplay of personalities (including Katherine and Annalee)–who all helped me return to this island. Physically. Mentally. Creatively.

Thank you.

I have one more week. Flying solo.