Fresh Milk is located on the premises of a former plantation built in the mid-1600s. It has been functioning as a dairy farm for several decades. My home and studio are located on the farm, and I have turned my studio into Fresh Milk’s headquarters. Due to the island’s brutal history rooted in indentureship and the slave trade, the physical location of Fresh Milk has raised concerns as to whether it is a legitimate or appropriate setting to carry out its work. Traditionally, the plantation was an exclusive venue, hospitable only to a white elite planter class who oversaw the inhumane treatment of an enslaved and indentured population.
I am interested in this debate about the plantation as a fixed space, defined perpetually by conflict and division. I see this location as a site for investigation; an environment which I am unpacking from the ground up. By literally digging into the soil to find ceramic remains, reading through documents related to the former plantation, including conveyances, wills and deeds from the early nineteenth century, I am thinking about the potential for transformation and reconciliation. Through creative intervention via my own practice as well as the development of critical programming at Fresh Milk, the historical divisions within the plantation are reconsidered.
The idea of transformation is linked to hospitality, which originates from the Latin word ‘hospes’ meaning “guest” or “stranger’. I am concerned about the stranger or enemy among us and within our national boundaries, the region and the wider world. Certainly, there has been much debate within the insular Caribbean about belonging and ownership, which plays itself out most disturbingly at many of our national borders. There is a precedent of xenophobia which has come to define how Caribbean people think about citizenship and the landscape. The failure of CARICOM to provide a conduit for real integration after forty years of operation attests to this. For real change to occur, we need to be hospitable to ourselves first, work to ‘to open ourselves up, share ourselves out’ with the stranger in our midst, which we can do through the arts, creating safe, critical settings for exploration, innovation, connection, excellence and production.
Fresh Milk reacts to our needs at the moment in Barbados and the wider Caribbean by building a robust creative community within the local context. Our geographic consideration of the Caribbean is always shifting. The normative definition is the archipelago that stretches from The Bahamas in the North, to Trinidad in the South, moving on to Suriname and the Guianas. Its extension into the coastal rim of Central and South America and out to the diasporic outposts including Amsterdam, London, Toronto, Vancouver, NYC etc is evidence of the Caribbean as a broad and dynamic area.
