Lately, I can’t help but think about and be inspired by the idea of Belmont as a ‘living’ library*. While a sidewalk book shelf is not a new idea, in relation to Belmont it has different implications.
In January 2020, Alice Yard moved from Woodbrook to Belmont. We traded a backyard for a sidewalk. Here’s an excerpt from our anniversary message 15 Years Later,
The move put to a practical test our belief that Alice Yard is not, essentially, a physical site, but a series of ideas and relationships — a practice, a process — a space and not a place, extending through and beyond Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Caribbean to include interlocutors and fellow instigators dispersed geographically around the world, but connected by intentions and affinities.
2022 will see Alice Yard at Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany. The theme is lumbung or ‘rice barn’. As an exhibition, Documenta was born out of the conflict of World War 2 in 1948, as a way to heal society in Europe. It’s location in Kassel, somewhere near the border between Eastern and Western Germany, situates the idea of healing — in the form of a major contemporary arts exhibition, called Documenta. The curator/host for this upcoming iteration is an Indonesian art collective called ruangrupa. Lumbung is both physical and conceptual. Like the yard, it provides another way to work, collectively. Locally translated it resembles gayap, a shared task. This affinity is what drew us to participate.
Part of working together on this exhibition is a tool called lumbung.space.
... locally anchored and focus on solidarity and generosity in responding to the necessities of local contexts while simultaneously considering and working to support their sustainability and re-generativity.
It's a digital environment in which artists and collective are able to learn together and store this information to share later.
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As an externality, I'm learning to become an amateur librarian. Some new tools and skills for the Belmont Library. A crash course in bootleg libraries.
There's another little library project seeding — Taki Mati. It's a collaboration with artists from Caribbean Linked. Before the news of Documenta, a few of us got together to imagine a small library in the Caribbean Sea. We called it Taki Mati which has no meaning really, but could loosely (mis)translate or creolise into several things: talking-branch-friends. A space none the less to library/study in community.
