HOMO SARGASSUM International Symposium

 Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, Ph.D. is an associate professor of art history and director of Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies (MCHS) at Florida State University.  An art historian, arts administrator and curator, she has published widely on the art and visual culture of the African diaspora, on global modern and contemporary art, and on representations of race, class, and gender in American comics. Her writings have appeared in Burlington Contemporary; Critical Interventions: Journal of African American Studies Center, and ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. Her curatorial projects include Little Nemo’s Progress: Animation and Contemporary Art (2019) and Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996 (1997-98 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Caribbean Cultural Center, and The Studio Museum in Harlem). Her recent publications include “Al Hollingsworth’s Kandy (1955): Race, Colorism and Romance in African American Newspaper Comics of the Golden Age,” a book chapter published in Qiana Whitted, ed., Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in Early American Comics, 1900-1960 (Rutgers, 2023). She is currently completing a manuscript focused on African American newspaper comic strips produced during the Golden Age of American comics.

Presentation: Comics and Activism Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd

This discussion provides a brief overview of comics, produced in the Americas, that have engaged with historical, instructive and/or activism-focused themes. It will place Sargassum: Storie(s) of a Brown Tide in context within a lengthy trajectory of these comic forms, including educational comics such as Classics Illustrated (1947-71) and Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story (1957), and Jackie Ormes’s continuity strip called “Torchy in Heartbeats,” a celebrated, mid-century narrative of race and environmental activism that was published in The Pittsburgh Courier, a prominent African American newspaper. U.S. Congressman John Lewis’s groundbreaking, autobiographical March trilogy of graphic novels (2013-16) about the civil rights movement, and The Leak, a 2021 middle-grade graphic novel by Kate Reed Petty and Andrea Bell that was inspired by the Flint, Michigan water crisis will also be discussed.

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Michelle Bumatay is an assistant professor of French at Florida State University. She specializes in African francophone and diasporic cultural production focusing primarily on bandes dessinées or French language comics. She is the 2015 recipient of the Annual Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award for her conference paper, “Madame Livingstone and Notre Histoire: Travels in Time,” which was subsequently published as an article in Contemporary French Civilization. Interested in questions of representation, migration, transcolonial power, and historiography, she has contributed to several anthologies (Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities; Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spheres of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis; and Intermediality in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels) and has articles in European Comic Art, Research in African Literatures, Francosphères, and Alternative Francophone. Her book, On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power (Ohio State University Press), explores the range of Black francophone cartoonists’ artistic, narrative, and material practices since the 1960s and illustrates the reparative dimensions of their work.

Summary of Presentation: “Innovating and Inviting: Comics Edutainment”

This short presentation will provide an overview of how I incorporated Sargassum: Stories of a Brown Tide into two of my courses in the fall of 2024, both taught in French. The first, a course on francophone comics, focused on the range of collaborative practices across the anthology and students analyzed the artistic and narrative strategies employed by the various groups to disseminate information about Sargassum. The second, a course on contemporary France, looked at two of the comics in particular and used close readings of these comics to expand the definition of France and Frenchness.

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Passionate about textiles, fashion, and design, in a global context, Annie Carlano is an art historian and curator who has worked in museums and universities in the United States and Europe. She began her career as an intern at the Museum degli Argenti, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, and studied historic textiles there, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and in archives throughout Europe, especially France. Beginning her career in the US, she worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Museum of Fine arts Boston, Museum of New Mexico, and is now Senior Curator of Craft Design and Fashion at the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina.

Carlano taught graduate seminars in both Fashion and Textile Studies at FIT, SUNY, and the Parsons New School of Design/The New School, New York, as well as Parsons Paris, and continues to lecture widely. Writing on a broad range of design topics, her recent publications include Fashion Reimagined: Themes and Variation 1790-NOW and Craft Across Continents: Contemporary Japanese and Western Objects. Her current projects and interests are focused on Kuba textiles, and sustainable design and fashion.

Remarks

I am humbled to be here in the company of such extraordinary creatives. I thought I would focus on the history of “second skins” and how humankind in harmony with the natural world, has harnessed technology to create textiles and fashions, to express identity, notions of beauty, and power. A brief pan-cultural glimpse at materials and methods will reveal the past in the present, as we rekindle respect for the planet and sustainability and ignite our imaginations for Caribfuturism. Leading designers and artists operating in the craft/design/art/fashion/technology sphere will have many stories to share. Daniela and Annette Felder (FELDER + FELDER) on sargassum, materiality, and sustainable fashion, Mason Mincey of Soarce, on the innovative merger of nature and technology that is Nanocellulose, and artist Henri Tauliaut on “afro-naut” costumes and tech. The talent, skill, and positive energy of these distinguished practitioners will blend with you, our workshop participants, in inspiring “second skins” to express an Afro-Caribbean future.

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Michael D. Carrasco is the associate dean for research in the College of Fine Arts and is an associate professor in the FSU Department of Art History. His research centers on the Indigenous people of the Americas, particularly the cultures of Mesoamerica, as well as critical heritage studies, digital imaging, and the relationship between indigenous artistic traditions and the global art system. Carrasco has received many grants and fellowships, including ones from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), and the Japan Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR). The fruits of his scholarship have appeared in journal publications, book chapters, and in the edited volumes, Under the Shade of Thipaak: The Ethnoecology of Cycads in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean (Florida, 2022), Interregional Interaction in Ancient Mesoamerica (Colorado, 2019), Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Maya Literature (Colorado, 2012), and Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica (Springer, 2010). He was co-curator of the exhibition Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié (Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, February 16 - April 1, 2018). He has served as the interim director of the Museum of Fine Arts from 2023-2024.

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Chris Cyrille-Isaac is a poet, art critic, curator and philosophy researcher. He teaches theory at the École supérieure d'art de Clermont Métropole, and writes for various journals and magazines, including Le Quotidien de l'Art. He is co-author of the book Mais le monde est une mangrovité. Premières propagules (Rotolux Press, 2023) and has written articles for several catalogs. Curator of the transdisciplinary project Mangrovité and president of the curatorial platform Mangrovity Art Fund, his research focuses on Caribbean philosophies, black internationalist movements and anti-colonial literature. He recently curated a reactivation of the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists at Villa Romana (Florence). Chris Cyrille is a member of the scientific committee of the Edouard Glissant Art Fund and UNESCO's Routes of Enslaved People. He has worked at the Centre Pompidou  as a research officer, and was the winner of the AICA prize in 2020, and the ADIAF Emergence grant in 2022. He is also a former resident of the Villa Médicis, where he worked on a project with choreographer and dancer Smaïl Kanouté in partnership with Les Ateliers Médicis.

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Born in 1980, Nicolas Derné graduated in Information Technology Engineering in 2003 and ventured into photography as a self-taught artist in 2006. He traveled across Asia, Australia, and Africa, honing his eye to document daily life. Inspired by his wanderings of many years of travels, his photography captures and transforms reality's fragments, infusing them into a creative process that explores memory, time and space. By documenting fragments of reality in various environments, he integrates these elements into his creative process to create new visual narratives.Through superimposition, collage or the accumulation of new material, shapes, or colors over a photographic print I craft a new photograph that I call "residual photography" in order to transcend traditional documentation. His artistic work straddles a poetic and political commitment to his community and his own identity, exploring the subversive facets of Carnival or developing photographic series or video work of an almost mythical power, confronting humans with Mother Nature. His work is featured in the French national collection (CNAP) and various private collections (Dominican Republic, Dubai, Nigeria, France, Martinique). He co-founded Studio Lumina, an experimental space in Fort-de-France, of which he has been the artistic director since 2022.

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Morel Doucet (born 1990) is a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist and art educator who hails from Haiti. His work utilizes ceramics, illustrations, and prints to discuss the impact of climate gentrification, migration, and displacement affecting Black communities in the African diaspora. Through a contemporary reconfiguration of the Black experience, his work catalogs a powerful record of environmental decay at the intersection of economic inequality, pollution and policy-making.

Doucet's Emmy-nominated work has been featured and reviewed in numerous publications, including Vogue Mexico, The New York Times, Oxford University Press, Hyperallergic, PBS, WhiteHot Magazine, Hypebeast and Ebony Magazine. He graduated from the New World School of the Arts with the Distinguished Dean’s Award for Ceramics. From there, he continued his education at the Maryland Institute College of Art, receiving his BFA in Ceramics with a minor in creative writing and a concentration in illustration. Doucet's work is held in collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Tweed Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the Plymouth Box Museum, Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Microsoft, Facebook and Royal Caribbean.

Doucet has exhibited extensively in national and international institutions, including the Design Museum of Chicago (2023), the Venice Biennale (2022), the Havana Biennial (2019), the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, Miami, FL (2019); the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts, Pittsburgh, PA; the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2021), the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture (2023), São Tomé et Príncipe, Haitian Heritage Museum, Miami, FL (2019), and Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL (2020). As an Art Educator, he is interested in immersing young audiences in personalized courses that instigate curiosity, sensory perception, and visual literacy.

Tentative abstract of presentation

In this visual presentation, Morel Doucet, a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist, will delve into the transformative power of art as a tool for environmental stewardship and activism. Doucet's work, deeply rooted in his Haitian heritage, explores the intersection of cultural identity, environmental sustainability, and the Black diaspora experience. Through the mediums of ceramics, illustrations, and prints, Doucet crafts intricate narratives that highlight the urgent issues of climate change, migration, and displacement affecting marginalized communities.

As an environmental steward, Doucet uses his art to provoke critical conversations and inspire action towards a more sustainable and equitable future. He will share insights into his creative process, emphasizing how art can transcend traditional boundaries to address global challenges. Drawing from his extensive experience in public art projects, residencies, and educational initiatives, Doucet will discuss the role of artists as activists and the impact of visual art on shaping public consciousness and policy.

This presentation will offer a compelling exploration of how art, when intertwined with activism, can not only reflect the complexities of our time but also serve as a catalyst for meaningful social and environmental change.

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Tatiana Flores is president of the Tout-Monde Art Foundation and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. A scholar of modern and contemporary Latin America, Caribbean, and Latinx art, she is the author of the award-winning monograph Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013) and curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, distributed by Duke University Press, 2017). Among her most recent publications are the co-edited volume The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History and the article “The We Within: Oceanic Imaginaries of Caribbean Art” for LA ESCUELA_JOURNAL. A former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), Flores is senior editor of ASAP/Journal. She has held prestigious fellowships at the Getty Research Institute and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. A specialist on hemispheric racial formations, Flores authored the widely cited article “‘Latinidad Is Cancelled’: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct,” published in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2021).

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Elizabeth Fowler Beegle is currently a Ph.D. candidate of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. In her research of Francophone Caribbean literature, she implements the Glissantian approach of geomorphism as a lens through which to better understand nonhuman agents in the Caribbean. Implementing Malcom Ferdinand’s theory of decolonial ecology, she seeks indigenous and local methods in the Caribbean that address the imposed and fractured reality of how the human and the nonhuman interact. Recently, she completed an immersive Haitian Creole course to be better equipped to engage with Haitian literature and Vodou, primary focuses of her dissertation.

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Billy Gérard Frank, born in Grenada, West Indies, is a multi-media artist and filmmaker. His research-based practice explores themes of race, exile, memory, global politics, and post-colonial and queer decoloniality, challenging normative narratives and creating counter-histories. Frank's work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions at institutions like the Brooklyn Museum (2020) and the Butler Institute of American Art. His films have screened at major festivals, including the Berlinale and Sundance, and his art is held in collections such as the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts and Design and the Farnsworth Art Museum. He represented Grenada at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and was part of the collective representing the island at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia (2019).

Frank has received numerous grants, including the Ford Foundation Grant for his La Biennale di Venezia project (2022) and the Creative Capital Award in 2024. He co-founded the Nova Frontier Film Festival and Lab, which supports filmmakers and artists from the Global African Diaspora, the Middle East, and Latin America. He lectures on Directing and Design at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and has taught at NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and York University.

Moving to London as a teenager, Frank began painting and exploring experimental video art. He later studied at The Art Students League of New York and The National Academy of Fine Arts, working under American abstract expressionist John Hultberg. He earned an M.A. in filmmaking and media arts at The New School for Social Research. Frank currently lives between New York, Grenada and Paris.

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Gwladys Gambie graduated from the Campus Caraibéen des Arts of Martinique in 2014. Her work explores her own body and revolves around the character Manman Chadwon (Mami Urchin), a fictional deity created by the artist. Through drawing, painting, sculpture, embroidery and costume-making, the artist works with organic, bodily, spiky forms. She started drawing at a very young age and has a passion for fashion and textiles. Gwladys participated in numerous residencies, such as Création en cours, initiated by Ateliers Médicis in Guadeloupe, and Caribbean Linked V, organized by Atelier 89' and Fresh Milk, in Aruba in 2018. Then, the Fountainhead Residency, in Miami (2019) and most recently the Résidence d'artiste à la maison (SHAR), part of the Catapult program for the Caribbean. She is also a laureate of the ONDES 2020 residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris. Gwladys Gambie has taken part in the international exhibitions Désir Cannibale at the Little Haïti Cultural Centre in Miami, as part of the Festival Tout Monde (2019), and the Mercosur on-line biennial (2020), among others.

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Née en 1968, Sarra Christine Marie Louise Gaspard est Professeure au Département de chimie de l’université des Antilles et Directrice adjointe du laboratoire COVACHIM M2E où elle travaille depuis 1999. Elle a obtenu son doctorat à l’université d’Orsay, Paris XI, puis a travaillé en tant que chercheur post-doctoral à l’université de Pavie en Italie et en Suisse à l’Institut fédéral des sciences et technologie de l’eau (EAWAG) et à l’école polytechnique de Zurich (ETHZ). Ses travaux de recherche concernent la valorisation de la biomasse et la dépollution.

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Leah Gordon (born Ellesmere Port, UK) is an artist, curator, and writer. Gordon’s work amplifies ‘histories from below’ and recognizes the role of carnival, folk traditions, grassroots religion in performing and sustaining radical histories. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Dak’art Biennale. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti; co-curator of ‘Kafou: Haiti, History & Art’ at Nottingham Contemporary; and 'PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince' at Pioneer Works, NYC. Gordon’s book KANAVAL was published in 2021 and in 2022, her award-winning documentary Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti, was broadcast on BBC. In 2022, Gordon exhibited in and curated the Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale exhibition at documenta fifteen, Kassel; exhibited at MOCA North Miami, and Power Plant Gallery, Duke University. In 2023 Gordon’s works were acquired by the Kadist Collection and the Royal Museums Greenwich. In 2024 she was commissioned to produce work for Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam, and had works in group shows at UMOCA, Salt Lake City and Musée du quai Branly, Paris. Since 2019, Gordon has been working on, Monument to the Vanquished, which is about land enclosure and will output in 2025 as a book, an exhibition and a feature-length documentary.

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Herne Jean-Baptiste is an active, professional performer in the New York area who always endeavors to tell a personal narrative through art and performance. Leaving powerful impressions through numerous solo and collaborative projects, Herne Jean-Baptiste has a reputable name in the industry. Herne Jean-Baptiste is a New York City-based artist from Miami, Florida. He was inspired in sixth grade to dance under the direction of the Ailey Camp Miami summer program for two years. For six years, he trained at RickyDanco on a full scholarship. He later attended the New World School of the Arts while participating at Thomas Armour Youth Ballet Conservatory. He also attended the Dance Theatre of Harlem for two summers. He then continued his higher education at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, pursuing a BFA in dance, where he graduated in spring 2022.

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Dominique Hunter (b. 1987) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist living and working in Guyana. She received her BFA from the Barbados Community College in 2015. Past residencies include Caribbean Linked IV (Aruba) and the Vermont Studio Center Residency, following the Reed Foundation Fellowship award. Hunter has exhibited extensively in the region as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Miami. She has work in several prestigious collections including Guyana’s National Collection. Additionally, she has had her writings published in the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies Issue 11, and in “Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora.”

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Deborah Jack, is a St. Maarten and Jersey City based multidisciplinary artist whose work is based in video installation, photography and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology and ecological impact of colonialism. Her work was featured in the exhibition "Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990’s-Today" at the MCA Chicago and ICA Boston. In fall 2021 a retrospective, "Deborah Jack: 20 Years" was presented at Pen + Brush in New York City.  Her work is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, MCA Chicago and the Smith College Museum of Art. Deborah received a Jersey City Individual Artist Grant (2022) and a Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2021).   Deborah received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a recipient of a 2023 Soros Arts Fellowship. Deborah is currently a professor of art at New Jersey City University.

Presentation Summary

“Saltwater Resistance:  Visualizing the (un)geographic and Resonance of Archipelagic Memory in the Caribbean”

Deborah Jack will present recent and current projects that explore the shoreline of the (is)land as a liminal space. The fluidity of the water as it interacts with the shore and the lines that are created by that encounter as well as the temporal quality of those lines. Climate change has caused the warming of the oceans which has led to hurricanes that are explosive in strength, last longer and storm surges that push further inland and the inundation of Sargassum that reaches our shores.

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Nyasha Laing is a documentarian, impact producer, and writer whose storytelling explores freedom and inheritance. Her independent films have been featured in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Indie Memphis, the Pan-African Film Festival, BBC World Service, and museums and festivals around the world. Her writing and impact work have been featured on the BBC World Service, PBS, and other media outlets. Nyasha is a graduate of Yale University and NYU School of Law. She calls New York City, Kingston, and Belize home.

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Valérie Loichot is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of French and chair of the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. Loichot is the author of three books: Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literatures of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (2007), The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (2013; winner of MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize); and Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean (2020). She also directed a special issue of La Revue des Sciences humaines in honor of her mentor Édouard Glissant (Entours d’Édouard Glissant, 2013). In addition, Loichot has published over forty articles and book chapters on Caribbean literature and culture, hurricanes and climate change, creolization, contemporary art, food studies, and the Algerian War of Independence in venues including Callaloo, Études francophones, The French Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Small Axe, Southern Spaces, the Presses Universitaires des Antilles, and Cambridge University Press. She is currently working on two books: “Écritures de la terre” examines what Caribbean art and literature can teach the world as we combat climate change; “Fiction pour archive” rethinks decolonial historiographies of the Algerian War of Independence through fiction, film, pop music, autotheory and memoir.

Summary “Diving into the Sacred”

In “The Sea is History,” St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott invites us to dive into Caribbean History: “strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.” But how does one dive into sargassum? Many works in the Homo Sargassum exhibit defy the invigorating movement of diving, the fluid passage of the body between earth, air, and water. In its healthy state, sargassum is oxygen-filled and buoyant, never meant to attach to the seafloor. Because of human-caused rising sea-temperatures, what was once a source of life becomes lethal when it strands on lands and beaches, causing harm to faun, flora, corals, and humans. What was once fluid becomes stifling. Through the works of Caribbean artists Camille Chedda, Minia Biabiany, Nadia Huggins, Gerard Franck, and Alejandro Duran, I show that it is precisely through the act of diving into sargasso, of going beyond it stiffness and obstruction, of joining it in a practice of care and a recognition of a shared vulnerability, that Caribbean subjects can retrieve a sense of the sacred where human and plant life are thoroughly intermingled.

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Louisa Marajo's work is a construction of a multiple memory with many layers articulated in her installations. The figure of the sea is very important in her research: it represents the overcoming of compartmentalizing borders and the bridge linking Africa, the motherland and its descendants, the inhabitants of the Caribbean. Compilation of numerous photos, drawings, paintings, sculptures and videos. Her work plunges us into a labyrinth where everything mixes and transforms, from one temporality to another, in a disorientation that is both chaotic and orderly. As a French Caribbean woman, Marajo questions her own history in order to analyze the state of the changing world where identity is multiple. Since 2018, she has been interested in the ecological disaster represented by the proliferation of sargassum in the Caribbean Sea. The artist associates this plague with the current migratory chaos: how to welcome what we reject? How to overcome entropy? Her fascination for what is called "chaos" comes from her first book in hand: "Hurricane Hugo devastates Guadeloupe" where the images of the catastrophe of this 1989 hurricane are related to the energy of reconstruction. How to create hope in the chaos? Like flowers growing on ruins. Marajo’s work has been included in several group exhibitions, including at the Perez Art Museum in Miami (2019), the Dakar Biennial (2022), the Bamako Encounters 2022, the BISO Biennial (Ouagadougou – 2023), the Kaunas Biennial 2023…Public collection: CNAP in France.

Website: https://louisamarajo.com/
Instagram: louisa_marajo  

Abstract of presentation

Thanks to the Tout-Monde Foundation, the Winthrop King Institute and the FSU Museum of Fine Arts for their support in making this project a reality.

Sargassum is the flame of the beach

With their fire of existence

They remind us that we are in danger

Rising waters

They bewitch us and call us

To take refuge

under water or in dreams

With them

Transformed into a new man, a new woman

Let us become Homo Sargassum

As an artist, I see the world differently, I see what we don't want to see. Sargassum is a scourge, and we have to fight against it. I think we also have to fight with it, look at it and mix the human with the non-human. That's what interests me and that's what this HOMO SARGASSUM event is all about.

Through the four elements of life - water, fire, earth and air - this is a reflection that attempts an inner journey. Surrounded by scientists, keeping our feet on the ground, we artists are led to let our dreams run wild, to imagine worlds beyond this catastrophe. To breathe easier, to survive better.

Thank you.

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Florence Ménez has a Ph.D. in anthropology from EHESS (Paris) and Ca' Foscari University in Venice. Her research focuses on human/non-human relational modes in situations of environmental crisis (proliferation of marine species, oil spills). She conducts multi-site ethnographic surveys, notably in Italy, Brittany and the Lesser Antilles, with multidisciplinary approaches and practices, including an exploration of artistic forms. She coordinates the SaRiMed project (2021-2023 and 2025-2026) on risk perception and environmental injustice linked to the abundance of sargassum on the Caribbean coast (AMURE - UMR 6308, UBO - PHEEAC - UMR 8053, UA - Fondation de France). She is also leading a visual storytelling project, “Being another”, on the combined metamorphoses between humans, clams and blue crabs in the Po delta and Naples. Currently assistant professor at the University of Western Brittany (Brest), she is an associate researcher at the CRBC (Breton and Celtic Research Center) and at the PHEEAC (Powers, History, Slavery, Environment, Atlantic, Caribbean, at the University of French West Indies).

Summary of presentation

Title: Circulation and proliferation of recalcitrant non-humans: attachment, perception, resistance

In which manners do people living in Caribbean coastal territories in constant transformation cohabit with proliferating species, which by nature respect no borders?

Based on ethnographic surveys carried out in Martinique and Marie-Galante, this proposal intends to question the fruitful encounters as well as the areas of transdisciplinary frictions that allow for a better understanding and reporting of these environmental mutations and their social impacts through the co-construction of projects in science, art and society

The alliance of anthropology with artistic practices can be created, in a more or less fragile and lasting way, to express the degradation of the habitability of the coastline by the proliferation of species. We will focus particularly on the SaRiMed research-action project (lifestyles and sargassum in the French West Indies) and on the art and science Prolivariation process, set up to contribute to the updating of knowledge on social and health impacts, and to disseminate the plurality of discourses of inhabitants in the public arena.

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Martin Munro is Winthrop-King professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. He previously worked in Scotland, Ireland and Trinidad. His publications include Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre (W.H. Maney and Sons, 2000), Exile and Post–1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat (Liverpool, 2007), Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (California, 2010), Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool, 2014) and Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times (Virginia, 2015). In 2019, he published a translation of Michaël Ferrier’s Mémoires d’outre mer, and in 2022 and 2023 translations of Ferrier’s Scrabble and François, portrait d’un absent. He has also translated Édouard Glissant’s Une nouvelle région du monde and Laura Alcoba’s Par la forêt. In 2020-21 he was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. His latest monographs are Listening to the Caribbean: Sounds of Slavery, Revolt, and Race (Liverpool, 2022) and The Music of the Future: Sound and Vision in the Caribbean (Oxford, 2024). He is a 2024-25 Guggenheim Fellow.

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Eva Mustian is a physical environmental science Ph.D. candidate in the earth, oceanic, and atmospheric science department at FSU, with a research focus on the effects of Sargassum seaweed degradation on beaches in the tropical Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Her research focuses on how decomposing Sargassum influences beach metabolism, the chemical composition of these leachates, and microbial community responses. By analyzing the impact of Sargassum degradation through fieldwork and laboratory experiments, Eva aims to understand its broader ecological consequences, including nutrient cycling and its effects on the health of surrounding coastal ecosystems. Her work contributes to a deeper understanding of the challenges coastal ecosystems face due to increasing Sargassum blooms, informing future conservation and management strategies.

Presentation Summary

This presentation will include an overview of factors driving increasing biomass of annual Sargassum blooms in the tropical Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, such as nutrient enrichment due to agricultural runoff. Additionally, we will examine the ecological consequences of Sargassum degradation on coastal ecosystems, including the effects of decomposition on beach metabolism and how microbial communities respond to degrading organic matter. By highlighting the environmental challenges, this talk aims to foster a deeper understanding of the long-term impacts of Sargassum blooms on coastal environments.

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Christina Peake is a Bajan British transdisciplinary artist, AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Researcher with the University of Westminster and The National Archives (UK), whose practice focuses on where the narratives of multispecies engagement, marine contextualised African-descendent and re/indigenised communities inform and live restorative ecologies, through decolonial and eco-social liberatory practices. Christina was recently Artist in Residence for the Transforming Collections (TaNC) project, led by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute partnered with UAL Creative Computing Institute and in close partnership with TATE from January 2023 to December 2024. She is currently working on a number of projects with cultural, educational and environmental institutions and organizations across in the UK. 

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Marina Reyes Franco is curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC). Some of her recent projects include Puerto Rico Negrx (co-curated with María Elena Ortiz), at MAC; Tropical is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime, at Americas Society, MAC, and Mead Museum; El momento del yagrumo, at MAC; Resisting Paradise, at Pública, San Juan, and Fonderie Darling, Montreal; Watch Your Step / Mind Your Head, at ifa-Galerie Berlin; and La 2da Gran Bienal Tropical in Loíza. As curator at MAC, she has also led the commissioning of works inside and outside the museum by Daniel Lind Ramos (co-curated with Marianne Ramírez Aponte), Ad Minoliti, Tony Cruz Pabón, Eliazar Ortiz Roa, Julianny Ariza, and La Vaughn Belle. During her tenure at the MAC, she has contributed to the expansion of the museum's collection through acquisitions of pieces by Esvin Alarc.n Lam, Natalia Ortega, Dave Smith, Ricardo Cabret, Sofia Gallisá Muriente, Michael D. Linares, and Gwladys Gambie, among others. In 2010, alongside Gala Berger, she co-founded La Ene in Buenos Aires, which she directed until 2014. As curator and researcher, she has focused on Esteban Valdés’ work, and the impact of tourism on Caribbean cultural production.

Abstract of presentation

The presentation reflects on Puerto Rico Negrx, an exhibition co-curated by María Elena Ortíz and Marina Reyes Franco, which highlighted the work of Afro Puerto Rican artists, their diaspora, and Caribbean artists residing in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico Negrx has as a precedent, Paréntesis: ocho artistas negros contemporáneos [Parenthesis: Eight Contemporary Black Artists] a 1996 exhibition organized outside of a museum, that included creators declaring their Black identity and breaking artistic conventions of the time. The artists from Paréntesis, all part of Puerto Rico Negrx, rejected an inherent link between Blackness, folklore and craft. 
 
With that exhibition and the social context of the 90s as a starting point, Puerto Rico Negrx explored local exhibition history to include other voices, highlighting how Black Puerto Rican artists wrestle against the racial blind spots of the national cultural discourse. Reflecting on these shows, the presentation examines themes that emerged through the artwork selection, including identity, displacement, spirituality, abstraction, food sovereignty, migration, reggaeton and other music forms, and post-plantation histories.

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Vanessa Selk is a German-Guianese creative practitioner, art director and advisor focusing on Caribbean contemporary and activist art. She is the founder and executive and artistic director of the TOUT-MONDE Art FOUNDATION and co-wrote the HOMO SARGASSUM exhibition and film with Louisa Marajo. Selk conceived, curated or directed various cultural programs focusing on visual and performing arts in the Caribbean, such as the Tout-Monde Art Festival in Miami. Recently, she co-curated "The Open Boat," a group show launching the ATLANTIC ARTHOUSE, a collective for galleries and artists featuring art and design from the Caribbean Mid-Atlantic, co-founded with Lisa Howie. Following her diplomatic tenures at the United Nations specializing on Human, Cultural and Indigenous People’s rights, and later as the Cultural Attaché/Head of the Cultural Office of the French Embassy in Florida (today Villa Albertine), Selk has focused her work and research on the interconnections of art and politics experienced by underrepresented communities, with a particular emphasis on ecological contexts and disaster situation in colonial/postcolonial settings. Recent writings on this subject were published in The Power of the Story: Writing Disasters in Haiti and the Circum-Caribbean (Berghahn Books, April 2023), edited by Vincent Joos, Martin Munro, and John Ribó, as well as in Forgotten Lands: Neo-Carib Visions (Volume 6, september 2024). As an independent advisor and consultant, she is accompanying emerging collectors, artists and institutions from the Caribbean and beyond to better navigate and access the international contemporary art market.

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Marc-Alexandre Tareau holds a Ph.D. in ethnobotany and health anthropology. He defended his thesis in 2019 at the University of French Guiana (see his thesis on HAL) and subsequently conducted several research projects in the Amazon, the Caribbean, and North America (Google Scholar profile). His work primarily focuses on the interrelations between humans and their plant biodiversity, as well as their representations of the body, illness, and the diversity of their ethno-medical practices, particularly plant-based therapies, which he studies from dynamic and intercultural perspectives. Currently, he works at the Cayenne Hospital, where he is particularly interested, through a One Health approach, in the plural health pathways of migrant populations.

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Estefanía Vallejo Santiago is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at Florida State University. She explores visual representations of Puerto Ricanness through decolonial and critical race theory methodologies. Her dissertation examines muralism within Puerto Rican culture, highlighting its role in shaping community identity and reflecting broader social, cultural, and political discourses. Central to this discourse is the community within the context of site, illustrating how Puerto Rican artists have adeptly tapped into local aesthetics to amplify silenced voices, reassert territorial and cultural significance, and catalyze a collective resurgence of identity. She aims to reposition the power back to the artists and the people who use art, culture, and conversation to address the Puerto Rican condition, emphasizing the imperative of nurturing self-sustaining cultural communities. Her research extends to contemporary art and Creole architecture, aiming to reclaim Puerto Rican Blackness and unearth silenced stories. Her work, featured in Latinx Project’s Intervenxions and presented at the Association for Art History Annual Conference in the United Kingdom, challenges prevailing narratives and fosters critical dialogues.

Summary of Presentation

The Ancestral Landscapes Lab (ALL) addresses the profound sense of disconnection and displacement experienced by Afro-Puerto Ricans through preserving and disseminating Afro-Caribbean narratives and their associated environments. This digital project merges past and present, creating a comprehensive digital archive that charts circular journeys and emphasizes stories and sites significant to the Afro-Puerto Rican experience. By employing advanced documentation tools and engaging with community members and artists, ALL seeks to make visible and preserve the spatial memories and lived experiences of Afro-Caribbean communities, celebrating Blackness and its enduring legacy.

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Nicolas Wienders began his academic journey with a Master’s degree in physical oceanography, followed by two years aboard a hydrographic vessel with the French Navy, fulfilling his conscription requirements. During this period, they traversed the Mediterranean Sea and circumnavigated Africa, conducting a wide range of measurements.

Afterward, Wienders pursued a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Brittany. His research often required transatlantic voyages to collect essential data. He remembers one year experiencing a hurricane while being off Greenland. Since completing his studies, he has been working as a scientist at Florida State University, specializing in numerical modeling and oceanographic observations. His work has taken him to remote and fascinating places, including Antarctica or the Galapagos Islands.

In 2010, following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Wienders contributed to efforts to predict the spread of the oil. At that time, no existing tools or instrument could accurately forecast the oil’s trajectory, which inspired him to conceptualize and design a new device to address this challenge. This effort led to the creation of the Stokes Drifter, a now internationally patented and commercialized instrument.

In addition to his role at Florida State University, he is a naturalist, conducting wildlife surveys at Wakulla Springs State Park and serving as an ambassador for the Saint Marks National Wildlife Refuge. He also contributes to the community as an announcer for WVFS Tallahassee, as an attaché for the French Consulate, and as a member of the National Language Service Corps. His hobbies include cooking, participating in triathlons, fencing, photography, and watercolor painting.