Iberia Pérez González

Between October and December 2023, Trinidadian multidisciplinary artist Shannon Alonzo created the mural Play ah mas, Play yaself as part of her two-month CCI artist residency at Bakehouse Art Complex. She then intervened in the original mural through a performative action that took place December 7, 2023, during Bakehouse’s annual Miami Art Week event. This conversation explores Alonzo’s engagement with Caribbean Carnival traditions, the role the performative plays in her visual practice, and the various strategies she employed or experimented with in the creation of this piece.

Juan Carlos Alom is one of Cuba’s most notable experimental photographers and filmmakers. He explores the idiosyncrasies and contradictions of everyday life, highlighting often-overlooked aspects of Cuban culture through compelling imagery and non-linear, spontaneous visual narratives. Inspired by the aesthetics and tradition of the 1960s documentary cinema in Cuba, Alom’s oeuvre addresses Afro-Cuban traditions, spirituality and nature, and Caribbean diasporic experience from a poetic and metaphorical perspective.

Barbadian visual artist Ewan Atkinson discusses his creative process and the invisible microorganisms that inhabit the evolving fictional world, The Neighbourhood. This conversation developed in the context of a Caribbean Cultural Institute research trip to Barbados in March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic quarantine phase.

Puerto Rico-based dancer and performance artist nibia pastrana santiago develops site-specific “choreographic events” to experiment with time, fiction, and notions of territory. In this conversation, nibia speaks about idleness, exhaustion, corporal vandalism, and the tensions between bodies and space in times of global pandemic.