Performance: Nets have many holes
We’ve descended from
the heavens to hallways
and spaces filled to the brim with the touches
of the extra terrestrials.
Terre de la patria
and women bring us to the outreaches
of the boundaries
that need to be materially transcended.
Contact springs to mind
as images of white beaches
translate the energy of stars
that reside in the open palms
of the arresting and
cardiac arrested-hold your breath-
talk to me beyond your tongue-
beings who walk among us.
They’ve uncovered the silences
inherent to the discovery of where they’re from.
Collectively recollecting
the collection of universalities
because we’ve saved the best jokes
for our wakes.
So let’s say goodbye
to easy and comfortable generalizations
lain to rest among
the ashes of the suspension of disbelief.
We are the invaders and squatters
of the modern art plantations
that drive us to and beyond the brink
of sanity and the sanitarium
and the sanitized.
Un-proper conduct defies our
understanding of places and cement cages.
Bodies inherited that navigate
constellations that move limbs
and tremble trees that trace
lines of faces unseen and felt.
Disturbed into freedom
through the separation of negation
from false consensus and consciousness.
Here is the call for an identity
based on achievements
and beyond the beauty of
localized categorizations.
Potent potentials produce
the populations that must
embrace their cultured nature.
Brought together development must be
shrugged off and expression
given the air to breathe and sigh
about slavery being our common link.
The sweet smell of division
translates the necessity of
multiple fences.
So we seek a balance
that exchanges roots and beets
with sugar cane and fish hooks.
Nets have many holes
and thus we puncture the whole
to move the center and the margin
and the cliché and the unexpected.
We become through the other
and our exceptionality is identified
through the loss of awareness.
Michael stands up
and reveals the romantic politics
of kissing the future.
We deal with the present
through the possible realities of the future.
My body now asks my fingers
why English is shared
and Remy notes the history of economic power.
Divided and conquered scars
of privilege reveal themselves
in the kinship of time with proximity.
Pride through distance.
Absolutes versus shifting sands of
the definition of humanity
Curated to disavow the energies
on stage
the stage uplifts what was created
to deny them existence.
Reimagining the center through the center
is no change at all
just tokens in the same broken slot machines.
Symbols appear that deny their indexes
recognizable through stripping away
bark from wood
exterior from interior.
Names come after actions
and resistances don’t just come afterwards.
Postcolonialism is part of colonialism.
Let’s escape the confines of time
and loop the post
return to sender
dub the steps
and not the stairs
escape the discipline
of otherworldly definitions.
We’re here to talk
about our work
about our locations
about our bodies
about ourselves.
The selves that move
in and out of sight
between the pauses
of time and space
and beyond
the notion of what is slightly
unsound.
By T. Martinus
Caribbean / Colonial history / Migration /
Agenda
Close Encounters of the Caribbean Kind
Artist talk around the exposition Who More Sci-Fi Than Us?
Network
Glenda Martinus
Artist
