On Friday, at 7 p.m., the Gri Gri Project at Bajo El Sol Gallery will host “After the Storm” Collective (ATS) as part of the Creative Conversations Series.
The After the Storm lab is a Black feminist collective representing daughters of the Greater Caribbean. The collective consists of Teona Williams (Rutgers University) and Kiana González Cedeño (Texas Christian University), Anais Couvertier Garay, independent scholar, and Lauren Prince, PhD student at Brown University, according to the press release.
ATS uses the digital humanities (film, art, StoryMaps, and digital archiving) to explore how ecological catastrophes forge Afro-diasporic bonds in Puerto Rico, the USVI, and the U.S. South. The collective seeks to erode colonial boundaries that seek to deny global Black struggle and solidarity without thwarting distinctive, historically contingent, and particular geographies. ATS constructs digital archives that center the testimony and oral histories of Afro-descendant/Black women and communities that have survived ecological catastrophe, the press release stated.
In the USVI, ATS fellow and former employee of Bajo El Sol, Lauren Prince, has conducted research on hurricanes Irma and Maria. Her thesis, titled “With a Vengeance”: An Examination of How Black women of the U.S. Virgin Islands Weather Disasters, focused on how systems of colonialism, race, and gender shape Black USVI women’s experiences during environmental disasters. She strives to center the experiences of Virgin Islanders in conversations regarding ecological catastrophe in her work with ATS and research at Brown, the release stated.
In this conversation, ATS will introduce the collective, their work, and their efforts to amplify the voices of Black and Afro-descendent women in the aftermath of environmental disasters. They will launch their digital archive project, created through StoryMaps, in the USVI and share their process of bringing together the shared experiences of Black and Afro-descendent women in the Greater Caribbean, it said.
The collective uses this term to describe and honor the shared struggles with legacies of colonialism in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. (Black) South. Finally, the collective will also share how they hope to extend their work through future community collaborations and foster conversations about how they can support the community through their work. ATS is a seeded microlab of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, it said.
For more information about ATS, go to https://afterthestormcollective.com/, and to learn more about Diaspora Solidarities Lab, go to https://www.dslprojects.org/.
The “Creative Conversations” series, sponsored by the Gri Gri Project, seeks to gather artists, writers, scholars, and community members in public dialogue about issues facing the Virgin Islands community with an eye toward community building and generating innovative solutions.
Photos: #1 Anais Couvertier Garay, #2 Artist, Tatiana Esh, #3 Group photo of ATS Collective.
