Motivation Manifest Invitation

We want to join you.

We want to share our sense of urgency. We don’t want to be comfortable. We refuse to accept comfort as the norm for inaction. Extractivism is affecting all of us. We don’t want to go back to business as usual. We don’t want to pervade. We wish to humbly place ourselves in-between … to navigate and thrive within that void so to act and learn. At some point we want everyone to meet, engage in each other’s collected knowledge. We don’t know how those meetings take place yet. Some of them will be through making, others through breathing, eating, talking and writing.

Our group shares the condition of the archipelago, in the Nordic region, and on the Caribbean. The commonality of our oceanic surroundings, of dramatic mountains and peaks, open sea and sheltered bays, beaches and lands foster alignments, divergences, and coincidences between our respective island regions that can bring about simultaneous cogency and agency.

We want to use the residencies, for artists who come from the region. And not only artists. We want to work in a postdisciplinary manner. Translocally. Praxis rather than Doxa. We want to avoid nationalist separatism. We believe in sharing. Sharing power, resources and responsibility.

We also want to support residencies in the Caribbean where the artists from the Caribbean are working. Stay-at-home residencies do not have to take place on a screen. We want to assist local artists so that they can work locally.

We want to ask how to get closer to a healthier mode of production. Together with you, we will address one or two words that you use on the website like “infiltrate” and “spectacular”. How can we not infiltrate, but place ourselves in-between, remain humble and keep learning? How can we feel and communicate the spectacular without sharing a photograph? If we want to avoid the spectacle of the spectacular of the archipelago we might dive deep into the ocean.

In the last year it has become clear that we need to think in terms of translocality – events and relations connect and influence several different localities and people at the same time. This means conditions or events at one place have an immediate impact on other connected places. We wish to investigate the archipelago, de-centring and triangulating flows between you and the archipelagos of Turku the Antilles – quite literally flowing along the Gulf Stream. The route of the eels. The unknown we are doing in the depths we share. Islands that now appear peripheral were once the centres of empires. Through connections to other archipelagos we want to draw out cultural and ecological specificities, while similarities between them shine light on planetary changes and causes. 

We want to be generous but we don’t need consensus. There are people in different parts of the world who are doing important things and we would love to invite them to join the discussion.

Is this what collectivism is? It is trust. It is to give voice. We don’t want to announce selected artists, we are not selecting, we want to add commas, collaborators, connections, conversations, fluid poetry.

We do not think that oil, extractive industries or tourism are the path to take. We want to know what happens when none of these alternatives are viable. What do they tell of the past and the present? 

We want to find a way of reaching the local actors for whom it makes sense for  us to join. We have a few ideas of who they might be, but we don’t know. We believe that you do. 

We need to learn things forgotten that are in advance. We want to make space for Nordic and Caribbean indigenous crafts and find new words for these nomadisms and remote interdependencies.

We want to explore knowledges, languages, traditions – indigenous and other, living, dormant, emergent in the present, divergent situated practices, embedded in the specific ecosystems and communities. Together with you we want to ask how to bring all of this together – across archipelagos and transhemispheric distances.