Alexandra Majerus
The View from (T)here
A View from (T)here is an interdisciplinary project that examines the interconnections between landscape, colonialism, identity, visual culture, and tourism, primarily in Barbados but also considering the Caribbean as a whole. It challenges the first-world construct of paradise, imposed upon the Caribbean through tourism, rendering the region into a homogenous space disconnected from time. A View from (T)here draws upon a thread of subversion found in Caribbean theory, literature and art production in order to contest the dominant construct. This body of artwork re-presents landscape, and its metaphors, through strategies of story-telling, ambiguity and repetition; using photography, sound, video and installation, creating a site at the intersection of identity, landscape, geo-politics and aesthetics. These operations attempt to symbolically reclaim the landscape and re-negotiate subjectivity, while implicating the viewers as participants in the artwork to put into question the power dynamics of north / south.