The Caribbean Linked Artist Residency Programme is a crucial space for building awareness across disparate creative communities of the Caribbean by finding ways to connect young and emerging artists with each other.  This regional residency project focuses on the sustainable development, regional integration and critical education of younger artists while exposing Dutch Antillean, Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanic artists to each other.

Caribbean Linked creates viable opportunities for young artists, writers, critics and creative activists to foster new relationships with a larger community, contributing to the holistic development of the creative industries. In addition, it provides the opportunity to link with industry professionals who facilitate access to wider global conversations for the region’s practitioners, while allowing the artists to create work, exchange ideas and participate in larger dialogues around art production.

Caribbean Linked is providing the necessary support which allows for regional integration and understanding to occur naturally, through the arts. Art has the ability to function and operate as a bridge to narrow the gaps in our cultural differences, revealing similarities that are essential for progress/growth.

In our local communities, there are major socio-economic problems plaguing the futures of  emerging talent. Caribbean Linked functions as an act of resistance against failing political and resolute nationalistic systems. It raises issues of collective futures by discussing the survival of artists and the sustainability of local and intra-regional creative communities.

PROCESS

The core team of Elvis Lopez (Ateliers ’89), Holly Bynoe (ARC Magazine), Annalee Davis and Katherine Kennedy (Fresh Milk) work together alongside their colleagues from other active and thriving contemporary arts spaces throughout the Caribbean to identify and nominate promising emerging artists from across the French, Spanish, Dutch and English islands, who are then invited to participate in this unique and invaluable residency.

This process is necessarily informed by a collaborative approach with the arts initiatives in other islands that are well connected to their local art scenes. It also takes into consideration the inclusion of artists from islands on the fringes of the region, or that may often be left out of the larger conversations which usually take place in relation to Caribbean contemporary art.

The driving force behind Caribbean Linked is to cohere the region through the arts and dissolve boundaries between the islands, whether they be linguistic, geographical or cultural. By highlighting what binds us rather than what separates us, this programme aims to plant the seeds of long term relationships that will strengthen and promote the growth of a healthy, unified cultural ecosystem in the Caribbean.