I wish I had known it then, but I didn't. I didn't know when I lived in Harlem in the 1990's the role that Virgin Islanders played in developing the radical movements in the 1920's and 30's. I wish I had known that when I was walking the streets of Lenox that I was walking in the footsteps of some of the greatest organizers and debaters and agitators who wrestled publicly with ideas of democracy, citizenship, blackness and liberation. I am beginning to hear their echoes as they reverberate from the pages, the letters, the dance tickets, the photographs, the posters that I held while on my first trip to the Schomburg Center for Black Culture.
How could that have been my first time going there? This amazing collection started by Arturo Schomburg who lived for a time in St. Croix with his Crucian family. Arturo Alphonso, son of Mary Joseph, was also a Virgin Islander, a Portocrucian, a Crucianrican a part of the long historical and familial ties between the two islands. I didn't know this either. We are a culture of unremembering and this process is our colonial legacy and so in turn the decolonizing will begin there, in the archives, sifting through letters of the American West Indies Ladies Society. Touching and reading the handwritten notes by an elderly woman in St. Thomas thanking them for sending her financial support, letters from various Virgin Islands groups inviting one another to dances and public debates, letters asking for solidarity to protest lynching, to fight for the rights of porters and domestics. There are nuances in the correspondence between these organizations. You can see that there are conflicts in the ways that one organization asks the other to please be in attendance in the event as to not embarrass them, or that the women's organization tends to very gendered roles in organization, bringing food, selling tickets, etc...However, what my first deep dive into the archives around Virgin Islanders in the Harlem Renaissance left me most with was the feeling of how they claimed public space as a space to debate ideas, signify meaning and presence. It is from this first encounter that I came up with the title for an exhibition, "When the jungle creeps up unto the skyscrapers". This is commentary by a journalist describing one of the parades in Harlem. It comes from a very racialized imaginary of course. But it's also signaling a claiming of space through sound and movement that I find fascinating and look forward to explore more during the rest of my fellowship. To read more about my project: Neither Subject Nor Citizen, my artistic research project at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Center for Research on Women see here.
I recently received an email by a young artist in Sweden who did a project where he used a copy of the speech I gave on a t-shirt project. It was very serendipitous for me as at the time I received the email I was at the Schomburg Center archives in NY researching speeches by Virgin Islanders in the Harlem Renaissance. La Vaughn Belle Inauguration Speech I Am Queen Mary, March 31, 2018 Greetings! My name is La Vaughn Belle and I am a visual artist from the Virgin Islands. I have noticed that in the city of Copenhagen there are many sculptures. There is a sculpture of King Frederik V, King Frederik VI, King Frederik VII, King Christian X, Princess Marie, Andreas Peter Bernstorff, Emil Christinas Hansen, Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Peter Griffenfeld, Joan of Arc, Salvador Allende, David, Thor, Diana, Aphrodite, Moses, Neptune, a drunken faun, a neapolitan fisherman, a blind girl, a blind boy. There are sculptures of mermaids, a cyclops, elephants, two lions, polar bears, a walrus, a snake and a troll. Quite a cast of characters. Not one of these sculptures have represented the African people who were brought to colonies in the Caribbean whose labor and lives helped to build this city. Not until now. I Am Queen Mary has been an ancestral calling to remember. They called and we responded. Each in our different ways. My journey into this project took a turn when I was sitting on the steps of my studio three years ago and I noticed some coral stones on the ground near the ruins of an outhouse. They were beautiful, but I wondered about why they had straight edges as if manipulated by someone’s hand. That is when I had a sudden remembrance of the history of these stones. I recalled how the enslaved Africans would be sent into the ocean during the low tide to cut them out of the reefs. The corals were then used to form the foundations of many of the colonial era buildings in our towns. However their labor was invisible. We often look upon this buildings as Danish, because of the Danish bricks imported from Flensburg that are the most visible. But these structures are not Danish alone and this history is not Danish alone. These coral stones in the base of I Am Queen Mary made a journey similar to those were taken from the African continent to get here- in ships, over the course of months and across the Atlantic. These stones are their testimony. Although Mary Thomas was a real person, it is unknown today what Queen Mary actually looked like, so with many icons we have projected our imagination unto her. As artists we created an allegorical representation of her in which the figure is a hybrid of our two bodies modelled using 3D scanning technology. In doing so we have created a new woman that can serve as a bridge between our bodies, nations and narratives. The torch and cane bill in each of her hands reference the weapons used by the colonized in their struggles for freedom. Her seated pose recalls the iconic 1967 photograph of Huey P. Newton, founder of
the Black Panther Party. The plinth incorporates coral cut from the ocean by enslaved Africans gathered from ruins of the foundations of colonial era buildings on St. Croix. Together these symbols create a multilayered, new narrative that promotes the idea that whether enslaved or free the colonized were agents of their own humanity. They fought, they resisted in small and large ways that are often invisible and unaccounted for in the colonial records. They demanded that the colonial system acknowledge their humanity and to be honest, they didn’t always win. Queen Mary herself, along with the three other women that she fought with, were imprisoned for several years in Denmark for protesting against unacceptable living and working conditions. Many people died under those conditions. Some were worked to death or were killed for defying being worked to death. Their labor paid for an immense amount of wealth that was generated for the Danish kingdom which throughout time has encompassed colonised territories in Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and parts of India, Germany and the Caribbean. Despite the vast effects of Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean, the visual reminders in Denmark are few. “I Am Queen Mary” will serve as a reminder to that history. They called and we responded. “I Am Queen Mary” is a project that came out of two individual artists, but just like Queen Mary and the other women of the Fireburn labor revolt, we came together to work on making a change. We were not invited or commissioned to do this monument. We pushed into the public space and claimed it to transform the narrative around the colonial histories that impact all of us. The ancestors called and we responded. It is a great honour to welcome the new Queen in town.
I recently got back from NYC and among many things had the opportunity to have a 2 day working meeting with these amazing women. It's on!!!!!
VI Studies Collective (VISCO) Founding Statement
2018
St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John, the group of islands currently known as the United States Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies) are crucial spaces for thinking through questions of sovereignty, personhood, and belonging. We are a group of academics, artists, and activists who are committed to centering the Virgin Islands as a site of inquiry and theorization beyond a notion of utopia or space that is not meaningfully occupied. As founders of VI Studies, we situate this field as a multidisciplinary framework through which we—and others—are able to study and understand the Virgin Islands. Our conceptualization of the U.S. Virgin Islands allows for various connectivities with Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands.
We are committed to centering the Virgin Islands as the intellectual, cultural and political center of our inquiry. We engage with other sites, including Denmark, the United States, and the wider Caribbean and African Diaspora secondarily but vitally. Given the radical intersectional politics that drive our work, VISCO aims to be attentive to the processes by which race, gender, class, sexuality, age, ability, and nationality frame the U.S. Virgin Islands and the power dynamics therein. We are committed to examining via intellectual inquiry, we are committed to creation via artistic practice, and we are committed to radical pedagogical interventions.
The founding of VI Studies began in 2017 as a series of conversations between LaVaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer, and Tiphanie Yanique. We, the VI Studies Collective (VISCO), are centrally concerned about the erasure of the Virgin Islands from larger discourses and the lack of resources to attend to our community’s needs, most notably the silences surrounding the territory's continuous colonial subjection, the lack of cultural institutions to preserve Virgin Islands history, and the ecological precarity demonstrated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. From this set of discussions grew the formalized working group, VI Studies. As a group of Afro-Caribbean women, we are committed to a practice of collaborative production and inclusion. We explicitly engage in collective knowledge production and seek out partnerships at all levels in ways that are beneficial to all parties, including citational practices and resource sharing. We have undertaken the project of carving out this area of inquiry in order to bring together the decades of research that has already been undertaken by scholars and cultural workers, both within institutions and independently.
In response to the film Det Sorte Kapitel (The Black Chapter) which premiered on September 29, 2018 I have many complex thoughts and feelings, but I will begin by giving some context. During the weeks leading up to the film there was a mounting sense of anxiety and confusion as I began to see the trailer and press package information emerge. I had also received communication that the premiere and panel discussion I was invited to attend as one of the key characters in the documentary would be in Danish, even with the push back of how language has functioned as a way to isolate and narrow the dialogue around colonial history. Instead of on the panel, I was placed in the audience with a translator as I watched a disjointed, pain-filled and confusing discussion about the experiences of people of color in Denmark. I sat there silent trying to understand the translator, trying to process the film I had just watched for the first time, wondering why I hadn’t seen it before and awkwardly coming to this conclusion: that in real time I was experiencing what it felt like to be written into the margins of history. This was very different from looking at the colonial archives and searching for invisibilized narratives of the enslaved and colonized of which much of my artistic practice entails. I was looking at an archive being created in front of me, in which my story had been written out, even though the record- in this case the film- evidences that I was there.
The challenge is that the film’s premise, at least how my engagement was secured, was a film that would follow the I Am Queen Mary project, a multi-year public art work between myself and the Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers whose first phase was inaugurated on March 31, 2018. This project garnered worldwide attention, being covered in over 100 media outlets in over 15 countries with an estimated reach of 1 billion people. Engaging the press in such an intentional way was an artistic and political strategy based on the knowledge of the importance of the narrative as a decolonial tool. So in addition to many hours of conversation since the film’s release with both Jeannette and the film director Maya Albana I present selected footnotes on the film Det Sorte Kapitel to extend the conversation to include the challenges in doing decolonial work.
I first became aware of this film project in 2016 when Jeannette told me that her friend, a filmmaker, had received funding to make a film that would follow her along the process of creating a memorial around the centennial. This memorial project was in its infancy, however, the film presents itself as capturing its birth in the scene of Jeannette standing in front of the Danish West Indian warehouse and declaring that she would make a sculpture there of a large black woman. This is not the beginning of the I Am Queen Mary project. Depending on where you place the coordinates this project has many beginnings and depending on how you frame the beginning dictates how you shape the narrative that follows.
One could argue that I Am Queen Mary began around 2008 when Jeannette and I both had opportunities to travel to each others’ homelands. I made my first trip to Denmark and experienced the incredible erasure of the former Danish West Indies in the collective Danish narrative. This sharp contrast to the inescapable reminders and visual remnants in the Virgin Islands led to the investigation of these material artifacts of the colonial period in my practice. On this first trip I was working with a Danish curator, Jacob Fabricius, on another transatlantic exchange project and met Jeannette at the artist talk of the exhibition. That trip changed the course of my work dramatically as it began to focus on our colonial past with our longest colonizer, Denmark. During that same year Jeannette made her first trip to both the Virgin Islands and Ghana which deeply impacted her practice and created a similar shift. She began to investigate her own country’s colonial history through her perspective of being a black Dane, often using her body as a vehicle and making diasporic linkages. Separately, on either side of the Atlantic we began a parallel trajectory of working with issues of colonialism from our respective geographies and biographies.
However, one could also argue that I Am Queen Mary began in 2014 when Helle Stenum, a Danish migration researcher and professor conceived of the Warehouse to Warehouse project for the upcoming Centennial anniversary of the sale and transfer of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States in 2017. This was to be a transatlantic conversation through exhibitions and other programming housed inside the warehouse in Copenhagen and the one in Christiansted on St. Croix. It was Helle who also wanted to raise the funds to commission two memorials that would have the theme of mobility and she asked both me and Jeannette, as the leading artists from our respective countries working with these issues, to interpret this theme in anyway we saw fit. My initial response to the proposed memorial was a sculpture of coral stones encased in plexiglass which I entitled Trading Post.These stones came from my properties but were originally harvested from the ocean by enslaved Africans and form the foundation of most of our colonial era buildings. They represent the invisibilized labor as they are often placed on top of Danish bricks and not seen until the building is in ruin. They also represent the true basis for the wealth of Denmark, the labor and lives of the Africans brought to the colonies. Jeannette’s response was transforming the image of the persona she creates in her Whip It Good performance into a sculpture of a large black woman and place it in front of the Danish West Indian warehouse as a counterpoint to Michelangelo’s sculpture of David that was already there. In conversations with Jeannette, Helle suggested that a homage to Queen Mary might be an appropriate figure to memorialize and Jeannette then decided to recast her Whip It Good persona as Queen Mary.
In another beginning I Am Queen Mary originates in 2016 when Jeannette and I first entered into dialogue around the memorial project. Jeannette was in St. Croix filming for another work she was doing on Hans Christian Andersen’s theater play The Mulato. By this time the Warehouse to Warehouse project had collapsed as the museum operating inside the warehouse had closed and the chief interpreter at the warehouse in St. Croix had left his position. Also by this time Jeannette had applied for funds that were made available by Danish agencies for the upcoming Centennial year and had received them. When I first saw the mock-up of her proposed memorial I had some concerns. We were able to discuss them when I invited her to my home for dinner. This conversation was the beginning of our transformative dialogues that led to a deeper understanding of our different positions and ways of seeing and which form the basis of the project I Am Queen Mary.
We discussed in depth her Whip It Good performance piece and I explained how using Queen Mary, our national icon and hero would be met with controversy regardless of the image used, however that aligning Queen Mary’s narrative with what I viewed to be a fetishized image of herself in Whip It Good was highly problematic. Jeannette disagreed with this interpretation of her piece. However, she did eventually agree to not use the whip as this was an instrument of torture and in the context of this history and what Queen Mary represents could be seen as a colonial version of a revenge fantasy. I suggested instead replacing it with the cane bill and the torch which were the primary tools of resistance used in the 1878 Fireburn and in many of the revolts in the Caribbean including the Haitian revolution. They are also worker’s tools that originally have functioned in the colonial project to dominate the landscape and convert them into plantations. By displaying these tools as weapons the subversive nature of converting colonial tools into tools of resistance could also be referenced. These were issues that I had been working with in another project entitled Cuts and Burns in my attempt to create a visual vocabulary around these ideas. All of this was and more were discussed that day and form the basis for another origination.
A few months after the meeting at my house Jeannette contacted me with the suggestion to combine our two projects via a brief Skype call. This alternate beginning is an important one because this moment speaks to many of the issues that the film positions itself to talk about, how the structures of power and privilege that are born in the colonial project are complex and implicate everyone. These systems and structures are mostly invisible yet infiltrate our most intimate spaces of desire, friendship and collaboration. Most importantly, because these structures are systematic we often find ourselves participating in them without intention. So although I agreed to the collaboration, it was not without reflecting on some of the structural imbalances embedded in our positioning in the world and our relationship to these systems. I was concerned first by the fact that my project Trading Postwas rather understated in comparison to the bombastic nature of placing a two-story black female figure in the public space. Being that I was from the Virgin Islands and this was one of my initial contributions to the project, I was worried that it would be a reenactment of the same invisibilizing of our narrative that the project was contesting. I was also concerned about the framing of our collaboration. Did Jeannette invite me into her project? Or did we enter into a collaboration? With the project now occurring in Denmark and Jeannette being the one who was ultimately responsible for the money, did we enter into the collaboration on equal footing? Would Jeannette feel that she had more of a voice because of these imbalances? And more importantly, would I? It took many months, many conversations and negotiations, me moving my entire family to Denmark for three months, on top of numerous other trips where I left them behind for our collaboration to develop and become solidified. Unfortunately, the film shows very little of this process. Very differently from the film project I believed I was a part of, the film’s narrative transformed into centering the friendship of two Danish non-white women, who have known each other since childhood, but whose friendship becomes threatened by the increasing racial consciousness of one, and the yearning of the other to understand. The film follows Jeannette’s journey through her artwork and begins and ends with Whip It Good, with I Am Queen Mary being a way station.
The history of several beginnings that I have articulated speaks to the power and significance of positionality. In the historical “black chapter”, in comparison to the Virgin islands, Danes continue to operate in a space of power in which they craft the narrative, because they have the resources and the institutions to do so. This is why a project that started out as two sculptures morphs into one that is located in Denmark. When thinking about the colonial project which has centered European narratives while marginalizing the voices of those who were colonized, one would have hoped that someone attempting to narrate any part of the story of I Am Queen Mary, would have taken these issues of geography and biography into account. This is the aspect of Danishness that is left unanalyzed in the film, although it is definitely commented on in one of the two scenes taken from the Virgin Islands. In the scene from the open forum that took place in July 2017 where I present the project for the first time in St. Croix there was a lot of debate over this positionality. As I explain to Jeannette in the scene that follows, “They see you as Danish. It doesn’t matter that you are black.” Although not in the film, I also explained that there is a “Danishness” that was critiqued in the lack of engagement and research done prior to our collaboration. There was a concern that once again the Danes are taking our stories and centering themselves in them by taking Queen Mary to Denmark. This is why hybridizing our two bodies to make the figure becomes an important aspect of the piece in an attempt to create a bridge. The work then functions as a platform by which these issues can be interrogated, exposed, and discussed and we use our bodies, our nations and our narratives to do so.
Although I am aware that it is radical in Denmark to have a film that centers the narratives of two non-white Danish women, I lament that the choice to do so further replicates the centering of Danish narratives while marginalizing those of the former colonized. As I watched the film for the first time at the premiere, I wondered about what it would have looked like to have widened the coordinates to have included: discussing the Warehouse to Warehouse project; to have imaged my studio and the work Trading Post; to have seen the coral stones lying in the ruins, or any of the myriad colonial structures that are we are left to live among in the former Danish West Indies; to have had the juxtaposition that I too lost a parent in this journey, that I too am a mother and that my children were often there in our meetings; or to have even a mention that in the midst of this project we suffered two category 5 hurricanes in the Virgin Islands. Admittedly there was a pain in watching my narrative reduced so much that I barely recognized myself. However, I Am Queen Mary is at its core a decolonial project. Decolonial work is not neat or linear. It is painful, messy and at times fraught with contradictions. But it is necessary. It requires each and every one of us to look hard at the ways in which we participate in this system and continue to uphold its policies, values and ways of imaging. Perhaps in the way Det Sorte Kapitel best functions is it gives us something by which to really see the complexities of this process and how difficult it can be. How despite friendship, despite good intentions, despite color, how the legacies of colonialism entangle us all. It is often the responsibility of the marginalized to signal their marginalization which adds an extra burden. Yet, part of decolonial work is to make visible these structures, to search for the ways we are implicated and compromised, and to write ourselves out of the margins.
In June I had the privilege of participating in this exhibition on St. Croix entitled "Animism and the Colonial Imagination" organized artist Janet Cook Rutnik. Here is what David Knight, Jr writes about the my work in the show:
"Several pieces in the exhibition pose
questions about the production of
knowledge. La Vaughn Belle’s series of
22 V.I. animal sketches titled ‘the Most
Wretched Objects of the Brute Creation’
reads like the scattered pages of an
exploded travelogue or notebook of
‘discovery.’ But here we do not see the
conquistador’s uncertainly drawn animals, symbols of the one divine reality,
but instead something more accommo-
dating to multiplicity and a kind of freedom. The ‘local’ V.I. animals, all of them
imported by the island’s colonizers to serve a function, refuse to submit to a universalizing or reductive eye. The mongoose bristle with prickly resistance; the cattle turn their backs to the representer, inscrutable and
opaque; the donkeys, beasts of burden at rest, meet the gaze with an idle indifference."
It was exciting to participate in my first art fair in December 2017, Prizm Art Fair, a satellite fair during Miami Art Week/ Art Basel Miami. Me and my collaborator Jeannette Ehlers were honored to present an artist talk about out monumental project, I AM QUEEN MARY. During the fair we exhibited a 50 centimeter prototype of the sculpture and a series of photographs based on the merging process of our two bodies.
"I Am Queen Mary", La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers
Prototype of "I Am Queen Mary" at the Workers Museum in Copenhagen
La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers at Prizm Art Fair, Miami December 2017
Peachcan Gallery
January 12- February 28, 2018
Artist Talk, February 1, 2018
Possessions | La Vaughn Belle
Chaney (we live in the fragments) _009,48"x60"
Having changed colonial hands seven times, the longest being Denmark and the last being the United States, the Virgin Islands has a long history of being a possession. During this time people, products, memories, stories, cultures and languages were transferred and transformed. There are countless reminders of this process and history. From the names of our towns after Danish royalty, the sugar mills in various stages of ruin that populate the hillsides, to the “chaney” that continues to be found on many properties, often surfacing after a hard rainfall. Historically, children rounded these broken pieces of pottery and used them as play money, a type of imagined currency. A morphed version of both "china" and "money", “chaney” serves as a reminder of our colonial past and fragmented Caribbean identities. However, these shards also tell the visual stories of power and projection and how cultures saw each other and themselves in this vast transAtlantic narrative. Similar to how we have reconstructed our histories, these paintings represent a symbolic gesture of restoration, a type of map that charts both the real and the imagined. They gather and take control of the fragments and recast them as embodied wholes, making visual the process of taking control of one’s narrative and being one’s own possession.
