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  • The Alchemy of Creative Resistance
  • La Vaughn Belle (bio)

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Figure 1.

Cuts and Burns (ledger series 002), 2017. Cuts and burns on paper scroll. Courtesy of I Do Art Agency.

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The alchemy of creative resistance, the practice of unbecoming a colonial subject, begins where it began—in the elements, in the basic structures of a thing. It’s speculative, a little fantastical, and protoscientific. It requires intuition, inquiry, and a daring imagination—nothing less—for transmutation to occur. From the beginning, the European plantocracy transformed the physical environment and the landscapes of the islands it claimed. Aside from running off most of the original inhabitants of the Caribbean sea isles, the colonizers burned and slashed the virgin forests to build the structures needed to extract their mono crops. They burned and slashed people, too, setting into motion another series of psychic and physical transformations. The increasingly necessary racialized structures were embedded into the colonial project with simultaneous processes that rendered some parts visible and others invisible. The counter, the de, the un to this are also necessary.

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I live on an island that was originally called Ay-Ay by its first inhabitants but was renamed Santa Cruz by Christopher Columbus and renamed again by the French as Saint Croix. We, however, pronounce it “croy,” like the English, who along with six other nations also claimed us at one point or another and sometimes at the same time. The French were the first to build lasting structures, and when the Danes purchased the island, they overlaid the French town Le Bassin with Christiansted and made it the capital of the eventually named Danish West Indies. They later created other towns also to be named after Danish royalty, such as Frederiksted and Charlotte Amalie, the latter being the last capital and located on St. Thomas.

I work in Christiansted, a town in the form of a gridded structure with many public buildings on its waterfront integral to the colonial project: a fort equipped with cannons and dungeons, a scale house, a customshouse, and a chapel (of course). With many of these buildings currently being federalized into the US National Parks repertoire, there are some elements that are now gone, like the slave auction block, or that remain out of public view, like the whipping post. Aseptifying unpleasant history goes that way; some items bleached will remain visible, some are removed yet remembered and others effaced and forgotten.

When we look at the Danish building codes of 1747, we see traces of how race became atomized and infused into everything. The forbidding of thatched roofs and wattle-and-daub structures often used at the time in West Africa is not just about the fear of fire and a request for less susceptible materials. The attempt to corral the free black population into a specific area of the town named Neger Gotted (later to be known as Free Gut) had no nonracialized [End Page 121]


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Figure 2.

Cuts and Burns (ledger series 002) (detail), 2017.

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Figure 3.

The artist’s studio, Free Gut, St. Croix, 2011. Photo credit Bernard Castillo.

The House That Freedom Built project, 2011–present

cover; it too was about social control. Many of the wooden cottages built by the formerly unfree still stand today. However, since so many are abandoned and derelict, they are susceptible to fire again, although for other reasons, since their transient occupants are mostly addicted to illicit drugs. My studio was one of these cottages (see fig. 3). It too had been abandoned and burned and then degraded to another deeper form of abandonment, the kind that slips into invisibility, like people. Located in the extended Free Gut on the western end of East Street, its purchase transformed my practice (and my life). The renovation process, the developed intimate knowledge of the materials, the subsequent research into the history of the former owners, and interviews with neighbors and former residents led me on a path that was speculative, a little fantastical, and protoscientific (see figs...

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