Art and Ecology Research Seminar

Wednesday 6 November, 5.15pm, Fine Art seminar room, King Edward VII Building

Dr. Giulia Smith (The Ruskin School of Art), Ancestral Rewilding in the Transnational Caribbean 

This talk builds on research carried out for the catalogue of Antonius Roberts: Art, Ecology and Sacred Space (2023), an exhibition curated by Professor Krista Thompson at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. Taking the work of Bahamian artist Antonius Roberts as a central case study, it offers a model for looking at a wider array of artistic practices that similarly take up trees, plants and gardens as privileged sites of ecological and political repair for Afro-diasporic communities living in the Caribbean in the wake of British colonization. In the early 1990s, Roberts started using reclaimed coppice from local building sites devoted to the construction of large hotels catering to foreign holidaymakers. What started as a commentary on the entanglement of sovereignty and sustainability in the Bahamian Archipelago gradually evolved into a practice that is cardinally concerned with climate change, as Roberts increasingly uses the remains of trees stricken by inclement weather to make his sculptures. Focusing partly on his 2005 installation Sacred Space (a memorial garden dedicated to the enslaved and carved out of wind-battered Casuarina trees), this presentation will draw on Mimi Sheller’s concept of ‘arboreal resistance’ to examine how Roberts and other artists, such as Annalee Davis in Barbados and Deborah Anzinger in Jamaica, have enlisted Afro-botanical epistemologies and material cultures in the fight against colonial and neo-colonial landscaping practices that continue to shape not only the transnational Caribbean, but the planet at large