I write this month’s column from where I am currently located at the Instituto Buena Bista, more often referred to as the IBB in Curacao, the Netherlands Antilles.  I was invited to participate in a residency at the IBB after having a series of conversations with one of the co-founders at an exhibition we both participated in a year ago in Martinique at the Fondation Clement.

The IBB is a bottom-up network co-founded and managed by Tirzo Martha and his colleague, David Bade to offer what they call an ‘Orientation course’ over two years to specially selected young Curacao students. To complement their teaching, practicing visual artists are invited throughout the year to the IBB to offer new views, or Buena Bistas, on contemporary art to the students.   Being the only post high school space for young people who are interested in the arts to gather and learn, the IBB is important in Curacao as the location to nurture and harness emerging talent.

@Instituto Buena Bista

On completion of the ‘Orientation course’, the opportunity is there for the students to receive financial aid to attend art universities in the Netherlands with support offered by the IBB for the application process.  The IBB maintains contact with the students throughout their time in the Netherlands.  At this time the IBB has 16 of their former students at art schools in The Netherlands and 27 students currently enrolled at the centre.  In 2012, the first set of IBB students will graduate from Dutch Academies and the IBB is keen to provide studio spaces for those who return to the island.

The IBB is marking its fifth anniversary and I am here to be a part of these anniversary celebrations through one of their platforms – the International Project Platform.  Two other platforms intersect – an Artist in Residence and an Educational Track – providing students with a dynamic and interactive centre which receives funding from several Dutch entities.  In the past five years the IBB has hosted more than 30 international artists in their residence programme.  These visiting artists support the IBB initiative through teaching, making their own work and donating an artwork which contributes to a growing collection of contemporary art for the IBB.

@Instituto Buena Bista

There is no financial support for the IBB from the local government.  Funding is exclusively from the Netherlands.  Curacao has recently developed semi-autonomous status and is a country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.  The connection with the Kingdom is strong and the space feels quite different to what many of us in post-Independent Caribbean states experience.  A polyglot society – many people in Curacao including most of the students at the IBB, speak four languages including Papiamentu, Dutch, Spanish and English.

The IBB is physically located at the Caprilles Clinic outside of Willemstad.  A Jewish founded psychiatric clinic, it offers care to patients who suffer with psychiatric disorders, drug and alcohol addiction.  The IBB has a reciprocal relationship with the clinic in so far as there is an open door policy allowing patients to wander into the IBB and pick up a paintbrush or just say hello.  One student has been clean for two years after a thirty-year crack addiction.  She entered IBB via her art therapist who recognized her ability and enrolled her in the programme on a full time basis.  The day I entered IBB, a short-term patient joined my group the same day.  An accountant, she is taking time out from the demands and stresses of contemporary life and using the IBB as a place to reconnect with her creativity.  Having said all this, the IBB is not an art therapy clinic.  It sees itself as a catalyst for young aspiring artists who benefit from being exposed to a wide variety of practitioners from around the world today.  Some well known visiting artists include US based artists Kara Walker and Guillermo Gomez Pena. Many also come from Holland.

@Instituto Buena Bista

THE BCC/IBB INTERNATIONAL PROJECT PLATFORM

The project that I am working on here at the IBB includes students from both Barbados and Curacao.  It uses aesthetics as a way to connect artistic communities and opposes the notion of the Caribbean as a region separated by water and language.  I see my role here at the IBB as a facilitative one to engender a connection between students at the Barbados Community College (BCC) and students here at the IBB.   This International Project Platform is the conduit for the connection and the working process is as important as the final result which will take the form of a video and a blog called “Let Me Tell You Something About Who We Are”.

In our conversations about this project, I have stressed the importance of making connections in a Caribbean context, suggesting that we think about broadening our sense of who we are and make a conscious effort to embrace the entire archipelago as a significant space to work in.

The project is conceptually grounded in Edouard Glissant’s paper titled “The Poetics of Relation” and Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Art Theory” offering a theoretical framework that links contemporary art practice with our understanding of the hybridized creole space we inhabit as individuals and as a region.

@Instituto Buena Bista

WHO ARE GLISSANT AND BOURRIAUD?

Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant is recognized as on of the great writers, literary critics and influential thinkers of our time.  On returning to Martinique in the mid-1960’s Glissant’s focus on ‘Relational Aesthetics’ prepared the groundwork for the “Creolite” movement, advanced the concept of ‘Caribbeaness’ and opposed the idea that the Caribbean could be described only in terms of African descent.  Glissant rejected French dominance in the French Caribbean while acknowledging a Caribbean identity informed by ex-slaves, indigenous people, European colonisers, East Indian and Chinese indentured servants.  Glissant believed our identities are constructed through telling, listening and connecting, thereby transforming how we think about who we are and how our societies function.  Glissant speaks about the notion of the rhizome – a root-like system that functions like a network on the ground or in the air.  The project takes this model of the rhizomatic network in the air, facilitated by the world-wide-web, as the mechanism connecting us throughout the Caribbean transforming our community and therefore our identity.[i]

For the purposes of this project, I link Glissant’s concept with the idea of Relational Aesthetics as theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud who acknowledges the internet as the vehicle which opens up and changes mental space.  Bourriaud defines Relational art as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” [ii]

As an example of how connected this Caribbean space is, the students were asked to complete national family trees noting the names of the country where they were born, and where their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were born.  What emerged demonstrated that this region was the first globalised space in the world.  The two sets of students have the blood of the world running through their veins.  They hail from Curacao, Barbados, China, India, the UK, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Suriname, and many islands in the Caribbean.  Whether or not we acknowledge it, as Michael Jackson said, we are the world and while some maintain an assertion of the region as a suite of insular nation states, this claim is at odds with the lived reality.

@Instituto Buena Bista

THE BCC AND IBB STUDENT PROJECT

The notion of a divided Caribbean separated by water and language has past its time, and this collaborative project insists that what connects us is stronger than what can possibly separate us.  To commence the exchange, nine BCC students made a video to show the IBB students what their art school environment is like at the College in Barbados.  It is lighthearted and whimsical.  The video was uploaded to the student’s blog at www.rcaacademy.tumblr.com  which also offers a page for each of the students to share their works and ideas using image and text.

I arrived at the IBB and shared the BCC video and blog as a way to introduce the project idea and work with the Curacao students to facilitate the second part of the project.  Their job is the same.  To create a video that is offered as a gift to the BCC students that tells them something about who they are.  Likewise, this video will be posted to a dedicated IBB blog complemented by each student showcasing an individual page showcasing examples of their works.

On the third day of my IBB residency, I scheduled a virtual class using skype to have our first interactive session and introduce students in Barbados and Curacao to each other.  The students were very excited to be in the same space and to meet each other.  The energy was electric.  Students had to negotiate the space and determine how to present themselves and interact with each other.

“Let Me Tell You Something About Who We Are” asks us to rethink the human Caribbean narrative.  It reinforces connection and builds community through a connective aesthetics as a socially engaged practice.  Making art becomes an opening for human exchange.  The gesture of making the video and the blog becomes an encounter which collapses the distance and opens a dialogue that could go on and on.

WHAT’S NEXT?

This project opens up the possibility of knowledge, connection, collaboration and dialogue with the intention of student/tutor exchanges happening between the BCC and the IBB.   On November 3^rd here at the IBB in Curacao, the BCC students video and blog will be projected alongside their IBB counterparts’ project for their fifth anniversary event; and again on November 19^th, the students’ video projects will be shared on the FRESH MILK platform in Barbados as part of a broader series of conversations happening there.  For more information on that event go to www.freshmilkbarbados.wordpress.com