Unsovereign Elements

Slought, the Brodsky Gallery at the Kelly Writers House, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce Unsovereign Elements, a project exploring geology and poetics in art from the Caribbean and its diaspora, from March 30, 2023 to May 10, 2023. Unsovereign Elements includes a series of film installations, a symposium, and several workshops at Slought, as well as a group exhibition at the Kelly Writers House, in order to create a space for discussion where academic, curatorial, and artistic perspectives on the Caribbean and its diaspora are in conversation. We invite you to join us for these programs, which are free and open to the public, and culminate in a full-day symposium at Slought on Friday, April 14, 2023 from 10am-5pm. Visitors to the film installations at Slought, featuring works by Deborah Jack (St. Maarten), Jamilah Sabur (Jamaica), Joiri Minaya (Dominican Republic), and Sofía Gallisá (Puerto Rico), can schedule a reservation through Eventbrite.

Caribbean cultural products and critical approaches are highly permeated by submarine, geological and atmospheric aesthetics, too often enclosed within frameworks of unavoidable catastrophe or fetishized tropicalism that posit the geological as either a destructive or a picturesque force. Starting with colonization and the invention of the Americas, geological elements were relegated—and still seem to be—to a fossilized backdrop status, defined and configured by modernity as epistemological vacuums, decorative backdrops, or disaster vectors whose sole purpose was to be traversed, extracted from and commodified. These dynamics have contributed to the traditional and utterly colonial image of the Caribbean archipelago as a linguistically, geopolitically fragmented entity, even though oceans, hurricanes, currents, and other natural phenomena are inapprehensible totalities that extend far beyond their materiality and beyond binary formulations of human-nature relations. They can never be contained within borders or even within national narratives, yet they do participate in the archipelagic production of identity and they inhabit the periphery of narratives of independence, statehood, and colony.

Artists engage with geological elements from the premise that the visual economies of the Caribbean are colonizing projects in themselves whose efficiencies and inefficiencies can be seen trans-historically. And one of the most effective geo-visual strategies has been to codify the Caribbean from its "islandness", from the difference between its fragments, without paying attention to the fact that geologically and historically these islands/fragments tend to a totality. Undoubtedly, colonial projects benefited from this material and conceptual isolation, more or less conditioned by visual technologies, to facilitate center-periphery relations of extraction and imperial networks of mobility.

Unsovereign Elements intends to create an archipelagic space of representation that moves away from master narratives—in this case, imperial narratives of sovereignty—and has the diasporic potential to expand to the global without erasing its local dimensions. The Caribbean archipelago is a region with unique circumstances, both in the organization of sovereignty and as climate emergency zone, and yet it is still divided by the nations, the language, and the history of its colonizers. To decolonize and to deconstruct the way in which these elements are conceptualized and to revalorize their poetic potential not only would integrate them as a constituent part of history, but would allow for a geological, non-anthropocentric, non-linear account of Caribbean history.