Panel Paper:
“Transregional Entanglements: Sexual Artistic Geographies”
Consent not to be a single being: Worlding the Caribbean conference
Tate Britain, London (online)
December 3, 2021
Video:
PANEL: Caribbean Worldings
Participants include Alexandra Chang, Lee Xie, Alpesh Kantilal Patel, and Nidhi Mahajan & Moad Musbahi. Moderated by Ananya Kabir
CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION
consent not to be a single being: War/ding Through the Caribbean takes the Caribbean and Caribbean thought as a starting point to reconsider global histories of art and contemporary public cultures. As a region wrought by the transhistorical forces of enslavement, colonialism, resource extraction and industrialisation, Caribbean modernity allows us to theorise larger patterns about forms of global modernities. Drawing on the foundational work of Caribbean thinkers Edouard Glissant, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, the symposium explores their impact on our understanding of the material, epistemological and ontological repercussions of these histories. The symposium highlights how these thinkers' contributions continue to act as generative frameworks for imagining new ways of being in the world, particularly within our current context of a global pandemic, planetary environmental precarity and transnational migration (description from Tate Britain website)
Paper AbStract
This paper will explore one case study from my book project Transregional Entanglements: Sexual Artistic Geographies, which brings queer and creolisation theories into dialogue. In particular, I will examine Polish American and Miami, Florida-based Jacek Kolasinski's ongoing multimedia Creole Archive (2015-1 project that meditates on the historical presence of Poland in Haiti in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a point of departure, the artist considers the transnational materialisation of the doleful Polish Black Madonna of CzE;stochowa as the Haitian Vodou spirit Ezili through his 3-d printed creolised sculptures. His Creole Archive not only challenges Poland's increasing xenophobia and rise in white nationalism but also its homophobia. Indeed, of particular interest to this paper is that the archive references how the Black Madonna has become an emblem of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTOI solidarity in Poland, as well as Ezili 's role as a patroness of lesbians and single mothers in Haiti. In so doing, I will argue that there is a need for a fresh look at creolisation theory alongside queer theory to understand better how Kolasinski's Creole Archive enacts, performs, and instantiates cross-cultural contexts for sexual, artistic geographies and brings into being a new world of intimacy and relationality across multiple times and spaces.