I am chuffed to announce the debut of my first art book in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist, Nyugen Smith. It has been a longtime in the making and represents several years of collaborative work with curator Tiffany Ward (Mare Projects) and graphic designer Dominic Skeete (Empyreal).
Nyugen and I meet virtually sharing our collage work in the early days of Twitter. That online friendship blossomed into a genuine connection, so that when he visited Barbados in 2017 we not only toured the island together, he also invited me to participate in a performance intervention he had in mind to stage at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society, currently the only government-sponsored art institution in the country. He found willing collaborators in the Museum’s staff, who have been working to decolonized (or at least put into better, wider context) its collection of artifacts that skewed heavily toward telling the story of the British plantocracy, rather than centering how slavery and the burdened black population funded the lifestyles of the overseers and governors, whose lavish beds and teaware are given dedicated rooms in the Museum.
Nyugen Smith posing as the Guard in the BHMS’s Warmington Gallery, where a typical plantocracy bedroom is staged. Photo: Llanor Alleyne.
The performance, The Guard, saw Nyugen as the “guardian” of these artifacts in the tradition of modern museum guards guarding against theft and touch, but also as an ancestral presence challenging the void of the Black presence of the collection as a whole. My role as the documentarian or “cultural anthropologist” observing not only how Museum visitors interact with the collection but also with the presence of “The Guard”, represents the universal you as spectator and agitator by memorializing the Black void in film and on video. The culmination of which is this art book, where Nyugen’s poem and my prose mediation on our experience is interspersed with images and stills of our presence in a place where the story of our ancestors has been subverted.
“In the call and response tradition located throughout the Black diaspora, artists and writers Llanor Alleyne and Nyugen E. Smith combine prose and poetry to critically engage topics of invisibility, tourism, sites of memory, and the value of the arts. The Guard is the culmination of their collaborative intervention with the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (BMHS).
During the intervention and throughout the book, a barefoot Smith positioned himself as the museum’s sole guard over a five-hour period as Alleyne, in her role as “Professional Staff”, observed and documented interactions between museum visitors and The Guard.
The Guard’s publication examines what it means to actively inhabit a place rooted in a past in which your marginalized ancestral presence underpins all that is on display. Throughout the publication, Smith and Alleyne explore the corporeal and spiritual effects of holding space on a site. Deliberately ignored and excitedly discovered over the course of the intervention, Smith and Alleyne offer insight into what it is to be living ghosts with an interplay of two voices made singular by the act of remembering. Each author weaves a line from the present to the past and back again while acknowledging their bodies as interloping vessels of time and possibility.”
The Guard is available for purchase here.