Amendments: Digital Griots as Traces of Resistance

Entering the gallery space, screen characters invite us to join in playing a game of dominos— as laid out on the table beside the screen. As we place the domino tiles, different characters appear on the screen, some acknowledging the game players, others more concerned with telling us their stories. They introduce us to a series of individual stories and tell us of events involving resistance and survival associated with living then, now, and in the future—in the reimagined places of Trinidad, London, and elsewhere.

The media artwork Amendments is a series of imagined narratives drawn from contemporary Caribbean and British landscape photographs, sound recordings, and materials from the archives. It raises questions and creates dialogues—not only critiquing what went on before but noting what remains and what may exist in the future spaces of Trinidad, England, and other ex-colonial spaces.

I conceived the work from researching the archives and the legacy of radical anticolonial politics and culture that have been such an integral part of the Caribbean, particularly since the 1930s. The work is framed and informed by the work of Caribbean historians, critics, and artists who have critiqued Eurocentric history, have developed postcolonial Caribbean perspectives, and have asserted the importance of historical groundings as integral to the formation of Caribbean nationhood.¹ The central character of the narratives is “Venezuela,” an illusory and mythical woman seen from a number of perspectives by relatives, friends, and others. Her imaginary life-experience encompasses stories that critique and query the predominance of heroes in African- and Europeancentered anticolonial narratives.

The artwork fills the void of the resounding absences of the plantation workers’ history: the absence of their individual, personal, and everyday life experiences; the absence of the slave quarters and the indentured burial grounds; the absence of women characters and their stories.

Amendments continues the use of montage, layering, and multiple media (ambient sound, animation, imagery, writing, music, and voice) associated with my work.² I extend documentary photographs through the addition of imagined interventions. A series of present-day storytellers perform in the image—as “digital griots” who evoke events against a backdrop of imagery that might have happened, is occurring in the present moment, or may occur in the future. As short video sequences triggered through domino playing, they are set in various locations—from modern day rural Trinidad, through the memories of slave and indentureship journeys, to the urbanscapes of London.

The following screen images are taken from a selection of the video sequences. A series of gestures and attitudes become instrumental to the way in which a person endures, protests, resists, outwits, and outmaneuvers her or his given situation, performing in the past, present, and future to survive the plantation owner, the local politician, the financier, the legislator, the package holiday tourist, the American soldier, and the über-rich tourist seeking refugee in the safe places of the picturesque.

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