L’imaginaire de mon lieu est relié à la réalité imaginable des lieux du monde, et tout inversement. L’archipel est cette réalité source, non pas unique, d’où sont sécrétés ces imaginaires : le schème de l’appartenance et de la relation, en même temps.
Glissant, Édouard, Philosophie de la Relation, Paris, Gallimard, 2009.
Sunshine State, exhibition (31 March – 31 July 2022) at Pirelli HangarBicocca, is organized in collaboration with Tate Modern, London, where the artist had presented a first version, titled ?Steve McQueen”, in 2020.
The title of the exhibition evokes the artist’s new work, Sunshine State (2022), commissioned and produced by the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2022.
Catalogue extract, the essayIn the Dead of the Light: Steve McQueen’s Sunshine State by Cora Gilroy-Ware.
Fig. 1 Photographer unknown, African American man picking oranges at a contest in a grove, 1952, black and white photoprint, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.
[…] how do we know this man is American? With no name or record of his identity, he could be one of the thousands of men brought to Florida from the West Indies during this same era to carry out temporary agricultural labour, most cutting sugar cane, some working in orange groves.
Related : Also, from State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory; same caption.
Kay Andrews picking oranges at contest in a grove – Orlando. February, 1952
10000 daffodils–a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque.
My garden has at least 10,000 daffodils because I wanted to redeem Wordsworth. It’s a story about being forced to memorize his poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” So I decided that to pay homage to Wordsworth, I would plant at least 10,000 daffodils.
[…]
Sometimes, I have friends come over and we have a daffodil party, and we recite Wordsworth and drink champagne. It’s not Wordsworth’s fault that colonial education forced us to memorize a poem about a flower that we had never seen.
Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.
the time of evening when the women sit around telling stories with one eye on the sky, looking out for that strange white bird that perches on the tallest trees and watches them with a look that seems to want to tell them something. That they mustn’t go inside the Witch’s house, probably; that they mustn’t walk past or peek through the yawning holes that now mark its walls. A look warning them not to let their children go looking for that treasure, not to dream of going down there with their friends to rummage through those tumble-down rooms, or to see who’s got the balls to enter the room upstairs at the back and touch the stain left by the Old Witch’s corpse on the filthy mattress. To tell their children how others have run screaming from that place, faint from the stench that lingers inside, terror-stricken by the vision of a shadow that peels itself off the walls and chases you out of there. To respect the dead silence of that house, the pain of the miserable souls who once lived there.