Sucking Salt and Revisions: Modeling Ecologies—Take Care

Hosted by the research project Sucking Salt and supported by revisions, this exhibition hopes to nurture discourse around architectures of the Caribbean. From the Bahamas to Trinidad and Tobago, the expanse of its contents consider some of the built heritages of the Caribbean’s particular material, social, and political landscapes across various scales of thinking. Working through and with the concept of architectures, Modeling Ecologies: Take Care poses the built environment as an ​​infrastructure for social relations that is inextricable from its ecological context. Acknowledging the archive as but one expression of an otherwise inexpressible past, architectures in the plural also helps us to reflect on Architecture itself as a set of relationships between socialities, landscapes, and ecosystems. This exhibition contains a wallpaper installation alongside a library of referential texts from Sucking Salt, sculptures commissioned for the occasion by Ibiyanε and Gwladys Gambie, and a film by Deborah Anzinger.

In accompaniment, Sucking Salt’s zine Take Care and Vol. 1 of revisions are available for purchase. A corresponding program will comprise an opening reception on November 14 from 6–9pm, a conversation between Sucking Salt and artist and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich on Saturday November 16 at 12pm, and a screening on Saturday December 21 at 3pm. 

“Modeling Ecologies” (2024–) is an ongoing series interpreting, transmuting, and revealing the relationships between systems and materials. “Modeling Ecologies” appropriates the conventional format of the architectural ‘model’ to question how materiality and physicality can contain and express immaterial conditions, dynamics, and hierarchies. revisions invites artists to respond directly to this conceptual provocation through a sculptural object or installation. 

revisions is an experimental media initiative of re:arc institute and a platform for conversation around architectures of planetary well-being—a framework that acknowledges the interdependence of our social and ecological systems. The platform supports alternative perspectives across rhetorical and visual formats, cultivating approaches to planetary consciousness that prioritize custodianship and care. 

Sucking Salt is a project by artists Shani Strand and Zenobia that focuses on archiving Caribbean architecture and aesthetics for continued research. It is an effort to diversify architectural history to include and consider the Caribbean as a major site of material importance and of intersection between various cultures and colonial histories. If architecture is a way of bringing the past into the present, shaping the future, and dictating public and private spaces, it provides a space for creolization to be made visible in the aesthetics of structure and landscapes.

Hailing from Cameroon and Martinique respectively, Tania Doumbe Fines and Elodie Dérond are the creative duo behind Ibiyane. Named for the Batanga word “to know one another,” the Martinique-based design studio’s guiding principle is to nurture curiosity between people and cultures at a fundamental level, driven by a belief in the endless world of possibilities that conversations can open. Finding a sense of self in community, exchange, and collaboration, the pair work together to create everyday objects, primarily in hand-sculpted wood, that marry functionalism with the storytelling power of design to re-centre the canon on the heritage of the African diaspora. 

Gwladys Gambie was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique. After obtaining her DNSEP at the Campus Caribéen des Arts of Martinique, she exhibited and carried out artistic residencies in the Caribbean and internationally. It is first of all through drawing practiced since childhood then through sculpture, writing, and embroidery that the artist is questioning the female condition in Caribbean space. She draws her inspiration from the lush Martinican landscape which allows her to invent an organic, dreamlike, fantastic universe, and which takes a look at a dramatic reality. The fauna and flora on a refined or diluted background contribute to a poetic language of our bodies in its graphic writing. Creole, a sublime language with strong images and symbolism, becomes an important element in the creation of a specific iconography linked to the body. Through the myth of Manman Chadwon—a female creature in constant metamorphosis inspired by Manman Dlo (mother of the waters)—Gambie speaks of power, strength, and struggle, and navigates between sensuality, eroticism, and violence in a stifling colonial present. 

Deborah Anzinger is an artist and founder of New Local Space (NLS) in Kingston, Jamaica. Anzinger works in painting, sculpture, video and sound to interrogate and reconfigure aesthetic syntax that relates us to land and being. Her work has been exhibited institutionally at the 35th São Paulo Biennial (São Paulo, Brazil), the Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Kent State University Museum (Kent, Ohio), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, Florida), the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (Nassau,The Bahamas), and the National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica). Awards include a fellowship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2018), the Soros Arts Fellowship (2020), a MacDowell fellowship (2022) and a residency at Denniston Hill (2023).