Nohora Arrieta visits the 3rd Kingston Biennial Green x Gold and explores the tensions between the Caribbean’s touristic imaginaries and the colonial and extractive realities that persist in the region. By revisiting the artworks and curatorial axes, she raises questions about possible critical routes for thinking through the colonial archive, regimes of representation, and contemporary forms of marronage and camouflage.

It's noon. Outside, the thermometer reads 29 or 30 degrees Celsius; but as soon as we enter the National Art Gallery of Jamaica building, the temperature drops, and the unexpected coolness invites us to explore. With the exception of my friend, there are no more visitors in the galleries that, since December 15, 2024, host the most recent Kingston Biennial, under the name Green x Gold. Curated by Ashley James and O'Neill Lawrence, the title was inspired by the island's flag: the green of its fertile land, the gold of the sun's rays. That: the landscape, the land, the environment—its destruction—and the imagery of Jamaica as a tourist paradise are some of the ideas that informed the selection of 28 artists and 90 works distributed across six galleries: Politics & Poetics of Extraction; Land Re-Formations; Critical Paradise; Technological Terrains; New Horizon Lines; Feminist Ecologies.

I visited the Kingston Biennial in January of this year. It was my first visit to Jamaica. When I sit down to gather notes from the tour and conversations I've been accumulating over the past few weeks, the certainty of the data—curators, artists, pieces, room titles—isn't enough to dispel a feeling of uncertainty. Despite the familiarity with which I mention Grace Jones (the square, irreverent gesture), Bob Marley (three little birds), Sister Nancy (bam bam bilan), Usain Bolt (is there anyone faster in the galaxy?), I can distinguish the reggae tunes I grew up listening to in the Colombian Caribbean, or I visualize a clear sea, my idea of Jamaica is rather hazy. What I'm attempting—to comment on the Kingston Biennial—requires a pause: to stop and consider the questions and intuitions that arise from the collision of that which has been so often heard, imagined, and almost familiar, with its elusive and little-known materiality.  

The desolate depth of the string music in Gas Men (2014), the video installation by Christopher Cozier (Trinidad, 1955), sets the tone for the Politics & Poetics of Extraction room. In the video, projected on two channels, the silhouettes of two men dressed in business suits wave gasoline hoses like cowboy lassos on the shore of a sea or lake. The men's gesture could be a comment on Trinidad's gasoline industry, one of the island's main exports, or on extractive projects that repeat their alphabet of destruction in Venezuela, Brazil, or the Congo. Cozier's piece, more or less familiar to those who have recently frequented exhibitions that address the Caribbean or a part of it, is placed at some distance from another less known piece, but which expands this dialogue on extraction: the earth essays in aluminum frames by Shanti Persaud (Jamaica, 1974), Red Mud Essays: Wasteland & the Evolution of Things (2012). Persaud is a geologist by training and practice, and her installation traces the landscapes—broken, cracked, thirsty, eroded—expelled by bauxite mining, of which Jamaica is the seventh-largest producer in the world. 

 In every colonial project, there is a desire for extraction: land, minerals, bodies, various resources. In order to extract, one must occupy. In order to occupy, wars are created. Marlene Lewis's (Jamaica) installation Separate Realities (2006) has something of a comic book about it. Each opened tobacco box is a vignette in which a scene unfolds with toy soldiers, in military green uniforms, who now assault a transparent beach background, who now hide in a tropical forest. The beach and the soldiers could be in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or Puerto Rico. The works in the Critical Paradise room remind us that, just as a territory is occupied, so are the bodies that inhabit it. In order to do so, among other things, visual regimes are produced: ways of seeing that, in the case of the Caribbean and Jamaica, exoticize certain bodies. Wearing a yellow dress, a turban of the same color, bright red lips and two oranges in her hand, the protagonist of the photograph Yellow Bird in Banana Tree (2021), by Tiffany Smith, rules the gallery with her gaze, while confronting, glossing over and disrupting colonial traditions of representation of the Caribbean female body. 

 Colonialism, extraction, occupation. Some say that at this point these are redundant, even predictable, themes in exhibitions with the Caribbean adjective. If one were to point out the "meh" aspects of the biennial, one could add to the previous comment that the favored formats (installation, video, photography) are not new; or that it's strange how contemporary Caribbean musical traditions continue to be detached from certain ideas about the visual that circulate in the region: Why is there so little sound in these works? Why don't they smell like the street? I speak from the perspective of someone visiting for the first time, from the point of the continental Caribbean that is Cartagena, and I prefer to delve into the questions, into the tensions that I sense. Note that, although it may seem repetitive, the conversation about colonialism, extraction, or occupation leads us to questions that remain open, perhaps in some parts of the Caribbean more than others: How can we not talk about colonialism, if what is emphasized in our Caribbean present (whatever that word means) is the colonial situation, or what Quijano calls coloniality? How can we talk about anything else in a region where there is still so much to discuss at the institutional level? These questions lead to other equally relevant questions: How does art continue to hammer away at crucial questions without petrifying languages, forms, and vocabularies? How can we always imagine new routes, ways of naming and questioning, ways of escaping or camouflaging? It's because of questions like these that I sit down to watch the biennial. 

 We know from biographies and Wikipedia that Sir Harry Johnston dedicated his life to the infamous task of dividing the African continent for Europe. Little is said, however, about the reconnaissance trip he made between 1908 and 1909 through the English-speaking Caribbean. Reconnaissance, here, means mapping: to travel in order to colonize. Thirteen of the photographs Johnston took during his visit to Jamaica in the early 20th century are held by the National Art Gallery of Jamaica. They are photos of small towns (“Street in Port Maria”, “In Maroon Country”), of flora (“Bromliacaceous Epiphile”), of inhabitants (“Negro Peasant Woman”). They are driven by a paradigm of capture: here is a black woman, here is a plant. It is no surprise then that they are displayed in the Politics & Poetics of Extraction room. 

 Johnston's photographs feed into what Krista Thompson, in her book An Eye for the Tropics (2006), calls a colonial archive that constructs the Caribbean as an exotic and fantastic space, one that must be civilized. Thompson's research has transformed the field of visual studies over the past two decades and is at the heart of the debate that Green X Gold proposes. The question of the archive—contemporary and omnipresent—once again arises. It is suggestive, however, that it is being placed in a biennial organized by one of the oldest art institutions in the English-speaking Caribbean. In this sense, Green x Gold returns to the question of how we institutionally deal with the archive, and one would say that it leans towards two explicit possibilities. On the one hand, confronting the archive itself: the Caribbean woman who looks, in Yellow Bird in Banana Tree, disrupts what can be read as an attempt to capture the Caribbean female body in Johnston's Woman Offering Author an Orchid. On the other hand, assuming the (occasional) breadth of the archive and distinguishing, within it, ways to reformulate questions, review traditions and confirm, for example, that in contrast to the extractivist view of the colonial archive, there exists a counter-view whose escape strategies—even visual ones—in a place like Jamaica, are ancient.

So, as an outsider who was lucky enough to encounter an Albert Huie only once in her life and had never before seen an Everald Brown, I am moved that these two mid-20th-century Jamaican artists are featured in the Land Reformations room. Thompson says that the image of Jamaica as a paradise to be consumed by the European metropolis was accompanied by a picturesque style that is scarce in images that emphasize the work of Jamaicans or of them themselves modifying their environment. In Huie's Crop Time (1955), the land is transformed by a flock of black bodies moving, cutting, wrapping, and carrying bales of cane. Brown's Bush Have Ears (1976) explores the connection between individual and territory: mountains are mystical beings with faces, and human beings inhabit them just like tiny microorganisms, like the cells that constitute them. Sacred spaces, entities that treasure ancient knowledge, the mountains are not landscape but reverberation of the universe and its infinite movements in Mysticall Hills (1979), also by Brown. 

 I look at the paintings by Huie and Brown, and think about the traditions of marronage and camouflage that proved central to understanding Jamaica during my visit. Few slave societies saw a level of uprising similar to that of Jamaica. There, Maroon communities have continually existed in an interdependence with the environment that confronts colonial discourses of land extraction and instrumentalization and the violence with which those same discourses are visually manifested. Huie and Brown's paintings, as a Jamaican visual archive, reflect a continuum that feeds into more contemporary traditions—escapes, camouflages.  

 Kingston is crossed by the 76th meridian west and Cartagena, next door, by the 75th meridian west. Walking through Kingston, I remember the amorphous and sunny geography of some Cartagena neighborhoods. And in certain champeta songs, a musical genre native to Cartagena, the chords of Jamaican reggae can be recognized. My visit to Jamaica and the biennial was marked by the revelation of a shared sensitive space, a closeness. The similarities, distances, and differences that weave this space perhaps explain why I felt a predilection for the New Horizon Lines room, with its questions and promises.  

 In the printed images of Paul Anthony Smith (Jamaica, 1988), the geometric void of a fence reveals the sea or a beach with palm trees. For someone who grew up in Cartagena—Colombia’s tourist city par excellence—where access to the historic downtown is increasingly restricted for locals and the outright privatization of public beaches seems a not-so-distant reality, Smith’s impressions resonate with his comments on access and circulation in spaces imagined as paradise: Who has access to that beach? Who circulates it? Smith's fence, spray-painted over the image, fragments paradise to reveal that the image is not complete; that every paradisiacal beach hides an underside of exploitation or second-class citizenship, whether for Cartagenans or Jamaicans. 

 However, amidst the overwhelming horizon of questions imposed by the tourism industry and its colonial legacy, some pieces in this biennial are a candid invitation to believe in the possibilities of the present: to consider other horizons. For a year, Oneika Russell (Jamaica, 1980) visited and photographed Lime Cay, a beach where Kingstonians can still take a dip in the sea on weekends. The 26 watercolors in Lime Cay Figures (2023-2024) have a low frequency of the everyday, of someone who says “here we are” and lovingly observes their place. The blue, green, and lilac hues of Russell's sea and beaches radiate delicacy in the morning, at noon, or at dusk. Each watercolor is accompanied by a tiny text, taken from a magazine or website, that recounts a situation in Jamaican society that goes unnoticed, such as financial documents or weather reports. 

 By carefully examining the everydayness of water, Nadia Huggins' (Saint Vincent) underwater photographs link the fragility of the ecosystems that inhabit the sea's surface with that of those that live beneath it. The watery, silent abstraction of Huggins's landscape of bubbles and light creates a space to pause—to hold our breath—and imagine ourselves in the movement that is escape: in movement, contours blur; there, camouflage is possible. 

 Camouflage as a maroon technology, its imperceptible everydayness, open to question, confronts the certainties imposed by every image of paradise and its colonial legacy. Perhaps this is the provocation that persists, quietly vibrating, after visiting the biennial, the encounters in Jamaica, and the conversations: How do the visual escape strategies proposed by some artists dialogue with/insert themselves into ancient collective, community, and anti-colonial tactics? How do the words “movement,” “diaspora,” and “camouflage” contribute to rethinking necessary conversations in the urgency of our political present? In what ways do the questions highlighted by a biennial in Kingston reverberate in places where they should be heard, like Cartagena? What do we do to ensure that these dialogues, rooted in the similarities of shared spaces (the Caribbean, Latin America, and all those names that are sometimes mentioned and sometimes not), become present and future strategies for continuing to imagine other forms of existence? I'll stay here, on the tour.