Sucking Salt and revisions present
Modeling Ecologies: Take Care

With works by Deborah Anzinger, Ibiyanε,
Gwladys Gambie, Shani Strand, Zenobia⁠

Curated by Sienna Fekete
November 14 - December 21, 2024

Hosted by the research project Sucking Salt and supported by revisions, this exhibition hopes to nurture discourse around architectures of the Caribbean. From the Bahamas to Trinidad and Tobago, the expanse of its contents consider some of the built heritages of the Caribbean’s particular material, social, and political landscapes across various scales of thinking. Working through and with the concept of architectures, Modeling Ecologies: Take Care poses the built environment as an infrastructure for social relations that is inextricable from its ecological context. Acknowledging the archive as but one expression of an otherwise inexpressible past, architectures in the plural also helps us to reflect on Architecture itself as a set of relationships between socialities, landscapes, and ecosystems. This exhibition contains a wallpaper installation alongside a library of referential texts from Sucking Salt, sculptures commissioned for the occasion by Ibiyanε and Gwladys Gambie, and a film by Deborah Anzinger.

revisions is an experimental media initiative of re:arc institute and a platform for conversation around architectures of planetary well-being—a framework that acknowledges the interdependence of our social and ecological systems. The platform supports alternative perspectives across rhetorical and visual formats, cultivating approaches to planetary consciousness that prioritize custodianship and care.

Sucking Salt is a project by artists Shani Strand and Zenobia that focuses on archiving Caribbean architecture and aesthetics for continued research. It is an effort to diversify architectural history to include and consider the Caribbean as a major site of material importance and of intersection between various cultures and colonial histories. If architecture is a way of bringing the past into the present, shaping the future, and dictating public and private spaces, it provides a space for creolization to be made visible in the aesthetics of structure and landscapes.

Hailing from Cameroon and Martinique respectively, Tania Doumbe Fines and Elodie Dérond are the creative duo behind Ibiyanε. Named for the Batanga word “to know one another,” the Martinique-based design studio’s guiding principle is to nurture curiosity between people and cultures at a fundamental level, driven by a belief in the endless world of possibilities that conversations can open. Finding a sense of self in community, exchange, and collaboration, the pair work together to create everyday objects, primarily in hand- sculpted wood, that marry functionalism with the storytelling power of design to re-centre the canon on the heritage of the African diaspora.

Gwladys Gambie was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique. After obtaining her DNSEP at the Campus Caribéen des Arts of Martinique, she exhibited and carried out artistic residencies in the Caribbean and internationally. It is first of all through drawing practiced since childhood then through sculpture, writing, and embroidery that the artist is questioning the female condition in Caribbean space. She draws her inspiration from the lush Martinican landscape which allows her to invent an organic, dreamlike, fantastic universe, and which takes a look at a dramatic reality. The fauna and flora on a refined or diluted background contribute to a poetic language of our bodies in its graphic writing. Creole, a sublime language with strong images and symbolism, becomes an important element in the creation of a specific iconography linked to the body. Through the myth of Manman Chadwon—a female creature in constant metamorphosis inspired by Manman Dlo (mother of the waters)—Gambie speaks of power, strength, and struggle, and navigates between sensuality, eroticism, and violence in a stifling colonial present.

Deborah Anzinger is an artist and founder of New Local Space (NLS) in Kingston, Jamaica. Anzinger works in painting, sculpture, video and sound to interrogate and reconfigure aesthetic syntax that relates us to land and being. Her work has been exhibited institutionally at the 35th São Paulo Biennial (São Paulo, Brazil), the Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Kent State University Museum (Kent, Ohio), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (Nassau,The Bahamas), and the National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica). Awards include a fellowship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2018), the Soros Arts Fellowship (2020), a MacDowell fellowship (2022) and a residency at Denniston Hill (2023).

Sucking Salt (Shani Strand and Zenobia), Missorting Pigeonholes, 2024, inkjet on vinyl, 10.4 x 6 ft and 9.3 x 22.2 ft

Missorting Pigeonholes is an effort to encompass and acknowledge Sucking Salt’s attempt to diversify the archive of Architecture with a capital A. It both honours the urgency of the archive while acknowledging and holding accountable its limitations, especially in a colonial context. Through a mixture of found and personal images, the viewer engages with a diverse arrangement of architecture styles coming out of the Caribbean. The range of architectural styles are testimonies to history’s material accumulation. They are also sites that allow history to be fought over and contested in aesthetic manifestations. Can we make meaning out of land, memory, and time through lived and built environments?

Gwladys Gambie, Corals Sheds, 2024, clay, sargassum, bagasse, dimensions variable

Throughout my drawings, I use fauna and flora to create little ecosystems and oniric spaces. In my thinking about architecture and ecology, I take inspiration from organic shapes and traditional African houses made with natural materials. As a Caribbean artist, ecology is a return to the roots. I use corals shapes to create tiny models of sheds for resting—taking a break. In Martinique, we have an invasion of sargassum seaweed on our coasts. In the Caribbean space, the dilemma is: how can we use this element to our benefit ecologically? How can we take advantage of this invasion? To respond to these questions, I decided to experiment and to use clay, sargassum seaweed, and bagasse (the pulp from juiced sugarcane) to create my models. In Mexico, they create shoes and paper with sargassum. In Barbados, they just invented the first car with biofuel. This work is a reflection on how we can introduce the natural elements that surround us into Caribbean architectures.

Ibiyanε, elombe 024, 2024, mahogany, ceramic, glaze; tiled platform: 20.5 x 24.4 x 1.4 in; stool: 15.7 x 15.7 x 17.1 in

Obviously, family meals could never begin until Mamie Paulette was seated at her place at the table. Which she always did last. She always had something to finish in the kitchen, even if the dishes were hot and served. So much so that her chair was always at the end of the table, right on the border between the two spaces. We’d wait for her, calling her, Papi teasing her. Then, almost randomly, she would finally sit and start the meal with a laugh, saying nous mangeons nous. It was an expression she had borrowed, though only she knew its meaning, and would chuckle to herself at the mystery of it. From then the jokes and stories flew. Papi’s were the first we missed after he left, and now I smile inwardly, nous mangeons nous, thinking of Mamie. 

There are ecosystems that do not remain intact. What becomes of the houses our parents and grandparents built? Stories of quarrels are common. The land costs time and money to maintain, the doors remain closed, nature reclaims its rights. And then? It is a simple question that crosses the mind when a drive from the coasts to the heart of the island reveals deserted houses: archives, fragments of us, bits of Martinique. elombe 024 aims to be, first of all, a tribute to a family—to a mother and cousins who seek to open the doors and fill the walls with laughter. Birthdays, returns, farewells, and pain au beurre chocolat. As many questions as can arise about the future of our archives and the ecology of their transmission. And then a reminder, to go and prune the garden as promised. elombe 024 is inspired by the chairs of Mamie Paulette and Mamie Marie, Elodie’s grandmothers, and its installation nods to the colorful tiles of their homes.

Deborah Anzinger, Training Station, 2020, video, 16:10 minutes, dimensions variable 

In 2020, Deborah Anzinger began the environmental sculpture and eponymous video work Training Station, created in Maroon Town, St. James, a space of personal, historical, and ecological significance. Anzinger’s family is from the area, and the Maroon Wars against the British empire in the 1700s were won in large part due to the unique landforms and arboreal guerilla tactics employed by the Maroons, who historically occupied the area. Training Station experiments with and documents cultivating alternative socio-ecological and socio-economic paradigms that counter relationships to land and each other based on extraction and subordination, and instead develop relational aesthetics and physical placemaking that privilege and affirm manual labour and care in the service of more-than-human cultural survival. Along with the reforestation and community work of Training Station (2020–present), this work posits, interrogates, and intervenes in the relational dynamics between Indigeneity, socio-ecological survival, capitalism, and geo-politics. Catalysing art in service of the community rather than the consumer, together these bodies of work shift the paradigm from the capitalist to the ontological and the imperialist to the ecological—exposing and transfiguring the fragile paradoxes from which material culture is conceived and valued.

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