First blog post shared by the National Trust for Scotland.

“Curatorial approaches across the Caribbean region have often been vehicles for challenging and dismantling exclusionary global frameworks in visual art engagement. Nestled within this, have been artist-led platforms in the Anglophone Caribbean, such as Fresh Milk, ARC Magazine and Sour Grass, and the collaborative projects that stem from them. Such initiatives have arguably endeavoured to engage diverse archipelagic connections and expand self-determination in Caribbean visual languages, exploring new approaches to curatorship.”

Despite a long tradition of plantation archaeology in the Caribbean, there has been little engagement between archaeologists in contemporary Caribbean artists who similarly think with and through material culture. We here outline an interdisciplinary project that incorporates archaeological and artistic practice as a lens through which to understand the history of plantation slavery in Barbados and the significance of its material vestiges in the present.

“While sugar offers some commonalities between the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, specifically through capitalism and entry to European markets, our initial relationship to its production and continued impact on our societies is markedly different. “

The quarterly Barbadian and Caribbean arts newsletter RA (Representing Artists) was produced in the early nineties, spearheaded by a group of Barbados-based artists who saw the need to create a forum for more critical writing around contemporary arts in the region.

The hotel is to be built in historic Bridgetown, near its Garrison area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Included in the list of buildings are two adjoining warehouses to be demolished to make room for this hotel. The person on the panel representing heritage at the Town Hall Meeting, Andrea Richards, said they would do an archaeological dig once the building is demolished. Surely the goal of listing historic buildings in world heritage sites is not to demolish and then do digs? One of the international architects of the Uruguay based DRS360 Hospitality Lab suggested we locals could “run freely along the beach.”

On Being Committed to a Small Space is the fifth book in the Local Scriptures series - Critical positions from Central America, the Caribbean and its diasporas - an editorial project of TEOR / ÉTica focused on thinking about how the ways of seeing and doing art in the region have been transformed during the last four decades. This new book continues with our objective of making accessible a selection of several of the most relevant speeches and critical positions that have shaped the critical paradigms in Central America and the Caribbean.