one month after being known that island
ENGWAYS OF WORKING
1 AN EXERCISE IN FREEDOM
one month after being known in that island is a project
based on a group of artists working in and from the Carib-
bean region. In view of the location of our exhibition, in
Basel, Switzerland, our point of departure is the Treaty of
Basel, an eighteenth-century peace agreement between
colonial powers that recast the status of Caribbean territo-
ries. As curators who were born, raised, and work in the
Caribbean, we approach this treaty not only as a historical
artifact but also as a literary work, since its creation was so
steeped in speculation.
Ratified on July 22, 1795, and comprising seventeen
articles, the Treaty of Basel formally ended the two-year War
of the Pyrenees between the First French Republic and the
Spanish Monarchy. It restored to Spain the northern provinc-
es taken by France in exchange for granting France the
eastern two-thirds of what was then Hispaniola, the second
largest island in the Greater Antilles. While the pact was
settled in the neutral city of Basel, to resolve a territorial
conflict between two European countries on European soil,
its terms—as elaborated in article nine—involved realigning
colonial territory in the Caribbean. For the signatory powers,
the geographic location of those territories was so remote
that all decisions about their fate were made solely on the
basis of an imaginary context. The anti-slavery Haitian
Revolution, which began four years prior to the Treaty in
1791 by self-liberated former slaves in opposition to French
colonial control, was intentionally ignored. In hindsight, the
achievements of that uprising should have nullified the
treaty’s ninth article, which bestowed Haiti on France:
IX. In exchange for the restitution referred to in Article IV [“The French Republic restores to the King of Spain all the conquests it has made in its States during the current war”], the King of Spain by himself and his successors, yields, and abandons the whole Spanish part of the Island of Santo Domingo in the West Indies in all property to the French Republic.
One month after being known in that island, the ratification of this treaty will allow the Spanish Troops to be ready to evacuate the squares, ports, and establishments they occupy there to deliver to the French troops when they appear to take possession of it.
The squares, ports, and establishments referred to will be given to the French Republic with the cannons, war munitions and significant effects to their defense, which exist in them, when they hear of this agreement. In Santo Domingo.
The inhabitants of the Spanish part of Santo Domingo, who, for their interests or other reasons, prefer to transfer their property to the possessions of S. M. Católica, may do so within the space of one year from the date of this agreement.
At the time, of course, the Haitian insurrection was not
factored into the European edicts. From a contemporary
perspective, however, the article’s obvious historical futility
has symbolic value. Reality as imagined from a position of
power is one thing. Reality as perceived by those who suffer
the consequences is quite another.
The colonial structures established through international
settlements—the Treaty of Basel being just one of many—re-
configured both the cartography of the Caribbean archipel-
ago and the system of relations between local communities
and territories. Such settlements may be considered
blueprints for European and American colonial perspectives
on the Caribbean. Although technically legal, these docu-
ments created, modified, or outright destroyed local reali-
ties. From Tordesillas in 1494 to Concordia in 1648 to
Ryswick in 1697 to Aranjuez in 1777, and all decisions
made by the United States Office of Insular Affairs from
1898 onward, countless examples confirm this.
For almost three centuries, the Caribbean was the
world’s largest region under colonial control. Spain, France,
Holland, and England snatched up territories during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth
century, the United States of America joined in the fray. In
the twentieth century, a long list of foreign interventions,
primarily conducted by the U.S.A., continued to besiege the
already fractured region. Nowadays, a different kind of
control over large swaths of the Caribbean is exerted largely
by foreign investors who rarely consider the local population
when making deals that aggressively alter the socioeco-
nomic landscape.
The legacy of colonization has left the region with a wide
array of political structures. Some islands are still officially
controlled by distant states. Martinique and Guadeloupe are
departments of France, Curaçao and Aruba are depart-
ments of The Netherlands, Anguilla and the Caymans
belong to the United Kingdom, and the United States
controls Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands. And that’s not
even the whole list. Some are legally independent but
actually controlled by other governments. Some have
gained independence—with varying degrees (and defini-
tions) of success—after longer or shorter periods of foreign
rule. Drastic differences in self-determination status have
endowed the archipelago with a fractured concept of
sovereignty that, to this day, involves deep ambiguities.
Different peoples in the region embrace its complexity and
take ownership of its multiple meanings in their own
particular ways.
For this project, we aspire to what Barbadian writer
George Lamming calls sovereignty of the imagination,
which he described in a 2002 interview as “the free defini-
tion and articulation of the collective self, whatever the rigor
of external constraints.” As part of our quest for freedom, we
believe that articulating strategies for different ways of func-
tioning than those imposed by colonial or economic order
is essential in order to authentically live, sense, and work in
the eclectic Caribbean present. Hence, our sense of
sovereignty is and will always be irreverent at its core.
There are countless examples of Caribbean people
taking alternative approaches to nourishment, consumption,
conviviality, domesticity, and working. Imagining other ways
of living enables us to narrate our stories and to define our
relationships with history and nature, which is the basis for
the intellectual, aesthetic, and political production of our
latitudes. For us, the production of thought needs to be an
exercise in freedom—one in which we connect all the dots
that were never supposed to be connected while using our
multiple traditions simultaneously.
2 AN ELASTIC EXPERIENCE
After 500-plus years of colonial rule, it is no wonder that
the Greater Caribbean remains a fragmented affair. While
the colonial imagination conceived the Atlantic mainly as a
means of transporting products and people, the Caribbean
Sea amounted to a kind of negative space in which little
internal communication was deemed necessary. Even today,
it is easier for tourists to move around the islands using
routes available for cruise ships than it is for locals using
accessible means of transportation.
multiple expressions of particular and powerful cultures
have flourished in the Caribbean. What connects us is an
always flexible and flowing idiosyncrasy that incorporates
numerous histories and multiple points of view. The particu-
lar way we inhabit time in the Caribbean is one such point
of connection. It is hardly a uniform construct. Caribbean
time is a composite of multiple layers and factors, its
fluctuation best apprehended through the weather. It can be
said that the region only has one prolonged season, since
temperatures rarely drop or rise dramatically. On the other
hand, one can say there are two seasons—wet and dry. Yet,
within the wet season, there is the hurricane season, when
a storm can alter the whole configuration of the land, and
all human activity, in a matter of hours. Weather changes in
the course of a single day can be quite drastic. A sunny
morning can take a radical turn into torrential rain. Then, in
a matter of hours, a radiant sun may reappear, making a
single day seem like many.
The Caribbean’s elastic experience of time pertains to
history, too. Present and past paradigms coincide, collide,
and co-exist in the same unpredictable way that our rural
areas, beaches, and densely populated urban centers abut
one another—which is to say, in all possible, and even some
seemingly impossible, configurations. This historical multi-
plicity manifests in political realities, too. Certain areas of
the region, as mentioned above, still function under de facto
colonial rule. Others are run on neo-colonial or neo-liberal
rationales. Still others aspire to redefine their status. Any
attempt to comprehend the Caribbean and the ways of
working and inhabiting it, must therefore acknowledge that parallel times have always coexisted here—not just tempo-
rally, but conceptually.
It is from this compound perspective that we perceive
the Caribbean. We work with traces that are not explained,
but are evident everywhere, as long as we pay close
attention. These are traces of distant history, of the recent
past, of our day-to-day life. They are what we gaze at, what
we experience, what we embrace.
Curatorially, we approach this project in the spirit of
créolité as conceived by Caribbean writers Édouard Glis-
sant and Kamau Brathwaite. The term has had various
interpretations over the years by various thinkers. For us, as
for Glissant and Brathwaite, créolité connotes a for-
ward-looking embrace of diversity and the development of
relationships with all kinds of people, ideas, and aspects of
nature regardless of linguistic and national impediments.
We choose this version of the concept as a conceptual
framework for our working process. We use it as needed to
break out of imposed or inherited cultural forms and
patterns, and to create different mindsets, modes of being,
and ways of engaging everydayness.
3 A FLUID IDIOSYNCRASY
Recently, there has been new historical and archeological
research, such as the work of Reniel Rodríguez Ramos in
Puerto Rico, that points to evidence of sophisticated
exchanges and relations in the region prior to European
colonization. Clearly, there is a need for deeper investiga-
tions into the history of long-distance interactions in the
Greater Caribbean.
one month after being known in that island, is meant to
be the starting point of a new long-distance dialogue
between a group of visual artists and thinkers working in
the region and its diaspora. It is our attempt to make visible
the different ways Caribbean artists and cultural workers
have, little by little, been creating and thinking from this
region. For us, this project has intentionally been an exer-
cise in zig zagging—and that is a political standpoint.
The titular phrase, one month after being known in that
island, comes from the Treaty of Basel’s aforementioned ninth article, which describes the French and Spanish
governments’ intentions vis-à-vis the Caribbean territories.
Symbolically, the phrase is meaningful to us because those
intentions were not only never accepted by the people in
those territories, they were not even actually implemented by
the French who, caught up in other expensive battles, didn’t
have the resources to see to their enforcement. Isolated from
the context of the Treaty, this phrase’s meaning collapses
into utter speculation. While it seems to be describing a
linear time, it does not have a clear point of departure. It
appears to reference a territory but locates nowhere specific.
It does not identify the people to whom it implicitly refers,
nor does it explain what “should be known.” We chose this
phrase as our starting point since it represents what we
want the world to know about our region—that all of us who
live in this context have the capacity and ability to reinvent
ourselves as much as circumstances require.
Many of the artists included in this project work both
individually and collectively. All of them have practices that
are fluid and flexible. The works we assembled for this
project do not illustrate straight answers to the questions
raised by our curatorial statement. On the contrary, we have
consciously selected them in order to make people pause
and think about what they might mean, what their creators
might be expressing, and what kind of capacity we might
have or develop to inhabit créolité and the syncretic in a
genuinely internalized way.
Christopher Cozier, Elisa Bergel Melo, Guy Regis Jr., José
Morbán, Madeline Jiménez Santil, Minia Biabiany, Nelson
Fory, Ramón Miranda Beltrán, Sharelly Emanuelson, Tessa
Mars, and Tony Cruz Pabón are the participating artists. An
interview with each is included in this publication. As
people born and residing in Aruba, Colombia, Curaçao,
Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Puerto Rico,
Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela, these artists advance
different ways of thinking, inhabiting, reading, and commu-
nicating the Caribbean. In pointing out the frameworks from
which the region’s multiple local realities can be ap-
proached, their pieces address issues of autonomy, emanci-
pation, and resistance. In intersecting with—or running
parallel to—such power dynamics, they confirm the com-
plexities and the possibilities of our region‘s context.
Two writers, both of whom have grappled with certain
Caribbean realities in their literature, are also featured in
this publication. In Dominican novelist Rita Indiana’s 2015
novel, La Mucama de Ominculé (“Tentacle,” in English), one
character asks himself, “Do I have two bodies or is it that my
mind has the capacity of broadcasting in two channels of
simultaneous programming?”The Puerto Rican author
Marta Aponte Alsina seems to answer that question in her
2015 essay compilation, Somos Islas (We are Islands), when
she says, “We were never pure, but creatures of the trans-
plant, grafting, and bricolage, and maybe that is why we
exist.” Here, Aponte Alsina reviews strategies developed by
people from the region in order to maintain memories and
collective histories in the present while Indiana addresses
the problems of maritime frontiers, specifically how the
“legalization” of the sea has, since the beginning of the
European colonization, been the chief obstacle to circula-
tion.
Contrary to the negative-space approach, one month
after being known in that island proposes the Caribbean
Sea and the region in general as a binding agent. Like a
memory from the future, it offers a glimpse of the Caribbe-
an’s shared idiosyncrasy, where everyday experiences and
historical time are always liquid, and sovereignty may be
self-defined. Currently, exchanges between visual artists in
the region remain quite limited. In the middle of the previ-
ous century, there was a fairly healthy dialogue among
writers in the region. But music was the great cultural
connector—and, as such, it has been among the most
important traces for us as a guide. For this project, we have
summoned the twentieth-century spirits of Caribbean
literature and music with the aim of supporting a similarly
direct and organic network of relations among visual artists
and thinkers working today.
Pablo Guardiola & Yina Jiménez Suriel