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| La Vaughn Belle, Constructed Manumission, 2017; handmade wooden houses; installation at meter, Copenhagen; courtesy of the artist, Photo credit: I Do Art |
Excited to share some new scholarship about my work by Julia Micho Hori for the Avery Review. She puts my work in conversation with works by Hew Locke and Kara Walker in a brilliant essay entitled, "Caribbean Counter-Monuments: A Visual History of Dissent".
TWO: Incendiary Architecture
We learn that we have ancestors that we can talk to. We learn that they can talk back and guide us. We learn too that there are systems that must be burned or destroyed.
—La Vaughn Belle
"La Vaughn Belle is a US Virgin Islands–based artist who draws on the fictions and frictions of a variety of forms within a broad colonial materiality: architecture, furniture, pottery, archival documents, photographs, and paintings. Belle has worked within the genre of more conventional monumental forms, as exemplified in her collaborative project with Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers, I Am Queen Mary (2018). This 23-foot-tall statue of Mary Thomas—leader of the 1878 St. Croix labor riot and notably the subject of the first public monument of a Black woman in Denmark—depicts her on a massive stone plinth, seated on a throne. She wields a torch in one hand and a cane knife in the other, memorializing the transformation of these tools of labor into instruments of rebellion. First exhibited at the Copenhagen Workers’ Museum and now installed outside the city’s former Danish West Indian Warehouse, the figure is poised to cut and burn, illuminating the ways in which monuments silently instrumentalize power.
I Am Queen Mary contributes to a rich transatlantic dialogue with the visual and material archives of slavery and global Black liberation. The statue’s composition and instruments draw inspiration from (and give further dimension to) the iconic 1968 portrait of Black Panther Huey P. Newton seated in a rattan peacock throne, wielding a shotgun and a spear. The coral stone of the plinth, set and framed in concrete, lays bare both the historical depths of the enslaved labor that extracted it from marine deposits to build empires and the supposed neutrality of the pedestal as a formal convention of monumental display. With these gestures, I am Queen Mary unsettles and undermines the monumental tropes it utilizes.
In a contrasting approach to the same historical event, Belle’s Constructed Manumissions(2017) employs a set of several small, hollow, foundationless wooden structures that exist precariously between scaffolding and houses. These pale forms exhibit the ornate building embellishments made popular in in the town of Frederiksted, St. Croix, during its reconstruction after the labor revolt of 1878. During the uprising, in which plantation workers protested deplorable wages and working conditions, nearly 100 people were killed and 50 plantation houses burned to the ground. Almost 900 acres of sugarcane were destroyed. Caught between dual processes of destruction and unfinished regeneration in space and in memory, these storied structures thus commemorate the revolt. They also reference the designs of working-class and free Black communities who negotiated their freedom in the colonial era through the cultivation of sovereign domestic space yet remained aware of the need for mobility as a survival strategy.
Resisting the durability of the chosen materials and construction associated with conventional historical monuments, these small wooden structures memorialize itinerancy and impermanence. Made without frames or glue, they are held together with small metal pins and their own weight, representing autonomy and fragility at once. Their capacity to endure rests on a continuous cycle of disassembly and restoration. They are also constructed entirely from the fretwork designs ordinarily featured as architectural ornament (e.g., roof gables); here, the embellishments form the structure itself, “standing alone” as substantive and self-sufficient manifestations of imagination, planning, and technique. At the same time, the negative space between the ornate planks evokes the houses’ uninhabitability; their shelter is provisional, bordering on precarious.
In these terms, Constructed Manumissions also spatializes the promissory note of manumission, in which the enslaver was empowered to grant some individuals freedom without challenging the governing premise of slavery. Manumission was a means for advocates and beneficiaries of slavery to manage the public optics of the plantation’s ruling racial economy in the name of mutuality and respect. Belle’s piece reveals the hollowness of this gesture—a house that cannot shelter from the institutional superstructure of slavery is not an inhabitable reality but merely an ornament.
In another series, titled Cuts and Burns, she extends her dialogue with architectural fretwork as encoded language in the built world, employing the ornaments as stencils to burn ghostly inscriptions onto scrolls of paper. This material testimony recalls the agricultural techniques of the machete and the fire used to cut cane and burn its waste in the process of rum and sugar production, here reappropriated as tools of resistance. Written methodically in ash, the scrolls record the uprisings of the unfree not as reactive, randomized eruptions of violence in the landscape but as collectively organized systems of dissent. Resembling the ebb and flow of waves, the markings move in many directions and though contained in a pattern, they record many irregularities, emphasizing the particular within the collective.
From a distance, the long scroll reads like an official ledger, contract, or declaration, with each hole recording an absent presence in the archive. Up close, populated with scorched clusters of orderly violence, the holes mimic the tomblike blueprint of the slave ship—one of the most widely deployed abolitionist images circulated among Whites to give form to the unimaginable conditions endured by enslaved captives. While powerful, such representations also teeter uncomfortably at the edge of violence as spectacle. Perhaps responding to the dehumanizing dangers of this kind of display, the replacement of drawn bodies with etched burn marks sets fire to the archive of slavery. Bereft of the voices of the enslaved, the burn marks reconstitute the archive as a corpus of present absences. Placing these surfaces under the microscope and enlarging their gestures, patterns, and narrative capacities, Belle’s incendiary architectures reimagine the edifices, instruments, and testimonies of Black survival and protest. The multiply coded fretwork necessitates the close reading of the built world—passages in both space and historical narrative."
To read the full article on Avery Review please see the link.
