cultivating the archipelago
how to grow in this (a)salted (is)lands
to be planted in unknown land
unfamiliar soil
by hostile hands
we become garden and gardeners
from growing wild on hillsides
with weeds that flower
our roots busting up ruins
outlasting structures of empire
to coastline gardens
with plants that protect
watered by the sea and rains
we are intertidal imaginaries
cultivate resistance in roots and rhizome
our gardens are where we take
the dust of volcanoes
The bones of ancestors
The salt of storms and tears
and manifest fecundity
and nourish ourselves on
offspring rooting and routing
the archipelago
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This is part of the cluster Caribbean, Gardener. Read the other posts here.
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Deborah Jack
Deborah Jack, is an artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting and text. intersections of cultural memory, climate change. Her work was recently on view at TENT Rotterdam, the Perez Art Museum of Miami in the 2019-2020 exhibition The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, which opened at the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Jersey City Museum, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, and Delaware Art Museum. Residencies include a Lightwork, the Big Orbit Summer Residency. Her work has been featured and reviewed in the New York Times, Frieze, Art Burst Miami, and Hyperallergic. Deborah is currently a Professor of Art at New Jersey City University. In fall 2021 she will present a 15-year survey exhibition at Pen & Brush in New York City.
