Amendments: Digital Griots

as Traces of Resistance
Roshini Kempadoo

Entering the gallery space, screen characters invite us to join in playing a game of dominos
as laid out on the table beside the screen. As we place the domino tiles, different characters
appear on the screen, some acknowledging the game players, others more concerned with
telling us their stories. They introduce us to a series of individual stories and tell us of events
involving resistance and survival associated with living then, now, and in the futurein the
reimagined places of Trinidad, London, and elsewhere.
The media artwork Amendments is a series of imagined narratives drawn from contemporary
Caribbean and British landscape photographs, sound recordings, and materials from the
archives. It raises questions and creates dialoguesnot only critiquing what went on before
but noting what remains and what may exist in the future spaces of Trinidad, England, and
other ex-colonial spaces.
I conceived the work from researching the archives and the legacy of radical anticolonial
politics and culture that have been such an integral part of the Caribbean, particularly since
the 1930s. The work is framed and informed by the work of Caribbean historians, critics,
and artists who have critiqued Eurocentric history, have developed postcolonial Caribbean
perspectives, and have asserted the importance of historical groundings as integral to the

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formation of Caribbean nationhood.1 The central character of the narratives is

Venezuela, an illusory and mythical woman seen from a number of perspectives
by relatives, friends, and others. Her imaginary life-experience encompasses stories that critique and query the predominance of heroes in African- and Europeancentered anticolonial narratives.
ers history: the absence of their individual, personal, and everyday life experiences; the absence of the slave quarters and the indentured burial grounds; the
absence of women characters and their stories.
Amendments continues the use of montage, layering, and multiple media
(ambient sound, animation, imagery, writing, music, and voice) associated with
my work.2 I extend documentary photographs through the addition of imagined interventions. A series of present-day storytellers perform in the imageas
digital griots who evoke events against a backdrop of imagery that might have
happened, is occurring in the present moment, or may occur in the future. As
short video sequences triggered through domino playing, they are set in various
locationsfrom modern day rural Trinidad, through the memories of slave and
indentureship journeys, to the urbanscapes of London.
The following screen images are taken from a selection of the video
sequences. A series of gestures and attitudes become instrumental to the way in
which a person endures, protests, resists, outwits, and outmaneuvers her or his
given situation, performing in the past, present, and future to survive the plantatourist, the American soldier, and the ber-rich tourist seeking refugee in the safe
places of the picturesque.

For some of this recent work, see Verene Shepherd, Maharanis Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India (Kingston, Jamaica:
University of the West Indies Press, 2002); Hew Lockes art installation Cardboard Palace (2002); Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
(New York: Warner Books, 2003); Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean
Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Chris Coziers artwork, Tropical Night (2006present); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Marcel Pinass installation, G.L.O. School te
Pelgrimkondre (2005); and Rhoda Reddock, The Indentureship Experience: Indian Women in Trinidad and Tobago, 18451917,
in Shobita Jain and Rhoda Reddock, eds., Women Plantation Workers: International Experiences, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on
Women (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
For additional portfolios of my work, see http://www.roshinikempadoo.com.

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