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 at Florida State University. Her research areas include art of the Americas; art and visual culture of the African Diaspora; British Art, including an emphasis on the Black Arts Movement in the UK; global modern and contemporary art; museum and curatorial studies; and representations of race, class, and gender in American animation, comic books, and newspaper comic strips. She has published widely, including in Burlington Contemporary; Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture; The International Review of African American Art; The Journal of Global Slavery; The Oxford African American Studies Center; and ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. She has organized numerous exhibitions including Little Nemo’s Progress: Animation and Contemporary Art; Picturing Creole New Orleans: The Photographs of Arthur P. Bedou; and Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996. She is currently completing a manuscript focused on late 20th century appropriations of William Hogarth’s graphic narratives by Lubaina Himid, David Hockney, Paula Rego and others.

Michael D. Carrasco is the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts and is an Associate Professor in the 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 to April 1, 2018). He has served as the interim director of the Museum of Fine Arts from 2023 to 2024.

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 he crafts a new photograph that he calls "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.

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 overlooked 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Louisa Mathilde 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, Louisa 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.

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.

Moses Alexander März is an independent researcher, writer and mapmaker based in Berlin. After studying political science at Free University Berlin, and African Studies at the University of Cape Town he joined the editorial team of the Chimurenga Chronic in Cape Town in 2014. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Potsdam in 2021 for a dissertation titled “Édouard Glissant’s Politics of Relation: Mapping an Intellectual Movement of Marronage.” His research maps were first exhibited in Chimurenga publications and library installations. In 2022 a series of his large-scale hand-drawn map series titled “Mapping Decolonial Berlin,” was exhibited as part of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art curated by Kader Attia. Moses März currently works on an exhibition and publication project dedicated to mapping the relational political dimensions of the life-work of Édouard Glissant. In the framework of the Research Unit “Practices of Collaboration” at the University of Potsdam he is pursuing a postdoctoral research project on Ayi Kwei Armah’s Panafrican theory and practice of collaboration.

Abstract of presentation: “Imagining Édouard Glissant’s Relational Ecology – An Experimental Cartographic Approach” (working title)

I will present experimental cartography as an artistic research method that combines elements of the visual arts, social science, activism and storytelling to share knowledge in an intuitively accessible and inclusionary manner. My own mapping practice developed out of a long-term collaboration with Chimurenga — a platform for Panafrican culture, politics and music based in Cape Town, South Africa—and my engagement with Édouard Glissant’s philosophy and politics of relation. This presentation will suggest a set of contributions an experimental cartography method might make to the HOMO SARGASSUM project by discussing a constellation of maps that engage with decolonial ecological practices from the Caribbean. Among them is a map-diagram that traces the lines of argument in Malcom Ferdinand’s book "Une écologie décoloniale," published in 2019 (Decolonial Ecology, 2021), and a set of maps tracing the directions, forms and strategies of a relational ecological practice in the poems, essays, novels and extra-textual practices of Édouard Glissant.

Florence Ménez, Ph.D .in anthropology from EHESS (Paris) and Ca' Foscari University in Venice (Italy), devotes her research to relational modes in situations of environmental crisis (proliferation of marine species, oil spills) and to the habitability of coastal territories. She conducts multi-site ethnographic surveys, notably in Italy, Brittany and the West Indies, with multidisciplinary approaches and practices, including an exploration of artistic forms. She coordinated the SaRiMed project (2021-2023) on changes in lifestyles and risk perception linked to sargassum on the Caribbean coast (AMURE - UMR 6308, UBO - LC2S - UMR 8053, UA - Fondation de France). She is currently an associate professor at the University of Western Brittany, associate at the University of the French West Indies, and is continuing a visual narrative project entitled « Being another » on the combined metamorphoses between humans and non-humans in the Venice lagoon, Po delta and Naples.

Martin Munro is a 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 to 2021 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.

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.

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.

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 me 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 Wienders' 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.