Hassan Ali
CHENETTE doesn’t grow in Russia – the climate just isn’t right. Place is a part of process. The sunlight, among other necessary conditions for growing chenette, simply isn’t part of the environment here. Likewise, whether you’re “no place like home” or “anywhere but here,” you have a relationship with this country which moulds the way you live in it.
This relationship can be complex for our artists. Firstly, let’s note that the market for art in TT is small and it’s a quiet affair.
TT can be a great source of inspiration – there is no shortage of paintings of the country’s flora and fauna – just as it can be a source of pain because of a shortage of buyers. Unless an artist is uniquely positioned by the hard work, or their relationships, to make money from their art, it’s only common sense that their focus will likely shift from art to financial stability. Fortunately, this isn’t just a TT problem, and various programmes to assist artists have proliferated across the world, in the form of scholarships, grants or residencies.
A residency is a programme which provides lodging, food and time for the artist to work on their practice. Besides Alice Yard and a few retreats, TT has few institutions that offer residencies locally. Visual artist Kearra Amaya Gopee, 30, primarily known for their (Gopee’s chosen pronoun) video work, has a BFA in photography and imaging from New York University and an MFA from the University of California.
They’ve spent the last eight years of their life, since graduating from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in 2017, in and out of residencies – during which time they’ve consulted with programme directors on how residencies are run – and they are now setting up their own residency in their hometown of Carapichaima. Being an "anti-disciplinary" artist, Gopee believes their own artistic practice eschews the boundaries of singular disciplines or schools of thought.
This thinking has informed Gopee's artistic practice and has brought them to the formative steps of creating a residency here – something Gopee sees as an extension of their practice. The residency will run for two years per batch – one year online and another on site at Carapichaima. There will be four participants, two local and two diasporic/regional.
Gopee’s goal is to provide a space for those with politically charged practices a space to study TT’s historic and modern sociopolitical conditions while developing a project over those two years.
The residency’s name, A Small Space, is a nod to both the size of the country and the size of the four-person residency. The name carries irony – despite the size of a place, it can be a site of great power, learning or rest for individuals who are willing to let it be one. Gopee understands that residencies can be idyllic, vacation-like periods, but doesn’t want the residency to be only this. While they want to provide a space for artists to be temporarily freed of the demands of their lives, they do not want them to be entirely divorced from their social real
