On 12 November 6pm, as part of its non-formal education programme, the LCCA Evening School, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Art Academy of Latvia invites audiences to an artist talk by Quinsy Gario. The event will take place at the Art Academy of Latvia.
How do we talk about natural disasters, colonial exploitation, resistance and survival? Through the prism of his families experiences and stories Quinsy Gario is busy with a storytelling and performance lecture trilogy that looks at resource extraction within the Dutch Caribbean. During his lecture Gario will present on the two completed performances called Whiskey In A Crate, which was developed and is performed alongside Glenda Martinus, his mother, and How To Prepare for A Hurricane pt. 2. which was developed and is performed alongside Martinus and Jörgen Gario, his brother. Whisky In A Crate presents an understanding of the uprising 50 years ago on Curaçao against the unfair and exploitative labour practices of Shell and its subcontractors. In the piece Martinus takes the audience along a first hand account of that day through a small scale model of the route that the demonstrators marched. How To Prepare For A Hurricane pt 2. transports the audience to 1995 when the category 5 hurricane Luis destroyed St. Maarten where Martinus and her two sons were living at the time. Luis was up until 2017 the most powerful hurricane to have ever hit the island. The performance looks at loss, forgiveness and fundamental changes in the face of a life altering event with poetry, music and blue tarp. In the lecture Gario sketches an overview of the Dutch Caribbean political situation and explores how his work critically reflects and propositions new relationships.
Quinsy Gario (Curaçao/St. Maarten/the Netherlands), is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague and has a background in media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies. His work focuses on decolonial remembering and disruption. His most well known work Zwarte Piet Is Racisme critiqued the general knowledge surrounding the racist Dutch practice of Black Pete. He won the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, the Dutch Caribbean Pearls Community Pearl Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe 12 Theatermakers Prize 2011. He is a member of the pan-African artist collective State of L3, a 2017/2018 BAK fellow, a Humanity In Action Senior Fellow and currently a participant of the APASS program.
The talk is organised in the framework of the project Communicating Difficult Pasts, which is focusing on the uneasy relations between pasts and presents, their entangled nature in the 20th century and the impact that these difficult histories have left to contemporary realities.It aims at understanding the relationships between these difficult pasts and articulating their influences and presence today through the perspective of shared histories.