Lisandro Suriel, Tilting Axis Collections and Commissioning Fellow

Tilting Axis Collections & Commissioning Fellow, 2019, Scotland

It is a great honor to receive the Tilting Axis Collections and Commissioning Fellowship 2019, Scotland. I am more than thankful and look forward with great delight to participating in a cross-cultural discourse stemming from the creative ecology of the Caribbean. More so, I look forward to meeting you all! During this fellowship I promise to do my best to absorb everything there is to learn from this experience as well as to contribute to the intelligent imagination that I believe cultivates our realities. To be terse: I am so excited! Let’s do this!

Lisandro Suriel is a Photographer and Artistic researcher born and raised in Saint Martin. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and received his Master’s of Art by research in Arts and Culture: Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam.  As part of his Master’s thesis he analyzed early twentieth century illustrations of West-Indian mythology in relation to cultural aphasia. This research forms the foundation of his on-going artistic research project Ghost Island in which he visually deconstructs the New World-imagination of the African Diaspora.  Lisandro Suriel proposes that the imaginative lens is arguably the best with which to view how folkloric figures act as an agent in history and animate cultural memory. Lisandro Suriel seeks to employ the Caribbean’s own unwritten vestiges of ancestral memory and colonialism imbedded in landscape, architecture, and people to generate imaginative linkages to a political past and social identity. 

Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellow 2018

For the second year, Tilting Axis has facilitated, administered and designed an open call for our Curatorial Fellowship. In a strong partnership with the University of Texas at Austin Art Galleries at Black Studies we issued an open call to find and seek out a curator living and working in the Caribbean who would rise to the occasion to use the resources, collections and moment at hand to advance their practice in a nuanced and sensitive way. The jury panel comprising of Lise Ragbir, Joel Butler, Tobias Ostrander, Holly Bynoe, Annalee Davis, Eddie Chambers, Natalie Urquhart, Sara Herman and Mario Caro (9  in total) had the laborious task of deliberating an exceptionally strong pool of candidates from 7 countries. 

The competition was stiff—reflecting the wealth of talent, and need for increased opportunities, for curators in the region. We are happy to announce that this year’s Tilting Axis 4 Curatorial Fellowship sponsored by and to take place at the University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded to—Natalie Willis, Assistant Curator at the National Gallery of The Bahamas.  At the University of Texas at Austin with access to collections of work by African American and Caribbean artists, Natalie hopes to look beyond nationalist dialogues and examine how shared history presents itself in different cultural phenotypes. As she says, “One root leads to many rhizomes and proliferations of blackness.”

We notified Natalie earlier today—and of her own volition, she wrote the following message:

Tilting Axis
Curatorial Fellow:
Natalie Willis

I am still, frankly, in disbelief. I, perhaps wrongly, didn’t think I would have these opportunities when I moved back to The Bahamas after school. The constant worry for young Caribbeans going off to study who “dare” to come back is that you will hit the ceiling, that you will not have any real chances of upward movement in your career, that you only return at a deficit and for a love of this place. 

You can love this place, and it can love you back, and that love requires heartfelt work. 

The work that dedicated and fierce people have been toiling at for the last 30 years means that you give newer generations unbridled hope at the possibility, care, and freedom of being Caribbean-based cultural workers. I am humbled and so deeply grateful that you are taking a chance on me when it was never “taking a chance” to come back home, it is the work that needs to be done. 

I am overwhelmed, overjoyed, and looking forward to the day I can help some other young Caribbean mind and heart get this feeling of support. Thank you.
 

Biography

Natalie Willis is a British-Bahamian curator and cultural worker. Born and raised in The Bahamas, she received her BA (Hons) and MA in Fine Art at York St John University in the UK. Willis is currently working as an Assistant Curator at National Art Gallery of The Bahamas with a concerted focus on writing aimed at decolonising and decentralising the art archive, and adding to the literature on Bahamian and Caribbean visual culture and developing her burgeoning curating practice. Somewhere in a parallel universe, she still makes artwork.

As an emerging curator desperately trying to not contribute to the brain-drain of the Caribbean, she has dedicated her time at the NAGB to focusing on knowledge building and access through text and speaking to the way the colonial tourism of the late 1800s shaped the cultural and physical landscape of the Anglo-Caribbean. 

Willis has been an invited speaker at the Caribbean Studies Association  Conference (2017), the Museums Association of the Caribbean Annual Conference (2016). Most recently, she took part in the Goldsmiths + British School at Rome Summer Intensive Course, themed “Curating the Contemporary”, in Rome in 2017.