The Cloth Flies Away, is a line borrowed from Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe, from her short story, “The Chaos of Angels”. Howe brings us to the Between World, one of historicity and collision, a place where the cloth, imbued of both intimacy and too many meanings to bear, does indeed fly away to reveal other worlds of relation. This work is made from that space of collision with history, a place where past and present are continually folding over each other, like the work of a trickster figure, as our stories collapse into one another. Based on audio archive of the BBC Caribbean special reports from 1990-1998 that I researched at the Alma Jordan Library in Trinidad, these works consider the language of economic pre-condition (the pre-conditions imposed by empire nations for NAFTA entry) and how this economic language is woven into the lives of women who have been portrayed in archives and other images of this time.
My interest and understanding of these materials of neoliberal era economic worlding, are informed by years of looking through images, scholarship, archival materials, and maritime trade documents 17th-19th century colonial Caribbean histories that have formed my understand of what Michaeline Chrichlow refers to as “emergent conditions of existence” in her work, Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination Notes on Fleeing the Plantation.
photo credit: Stephen Petegorsky