01/05/2026
It was a joy to host the third An Ba Lanme Residency here at Caapi, in partnership with WAA (Waitukubuli Artists Association), Waituciruqe and Association Zofi, bringing together artists and performers from Martinique, St Lucia and Dominica. It concluded the journey that moved from language to the sea, and from the sea to stories. This 9-day residency was a collaborative exploration that inspired new forms of movement, circus arts, photography, food, dance, poetry…always asking the essential question; What stories do Caribbean artists want to tell?
Certainly, not the ones imposed from the outside, but the ones they choose to write for tomorrow. And for today.
“The Caribbean remains trapped in imposed narratives: a tourist paradise, a territory of disasters, an open-air colonial museum. These stories freeze populations in a temporality that is not their own, in a perpetual present with no possible projection.
Folklore becomes a trap when it locks people inside a fantasized authenticity, when living culture is reduced to dances for cruise ship passengers.
Faced with this narrative capture, Caribbean Afrofuturism offers an escape route: reinvesting fiction not as a form of retreat but as a political act. It creates worlds where Caribbean people are no longer objects of history but its active subjects. This approach responds to an urgent necessity: producing new images and new narratives that short-circuit dominant representations. Speculative fiction thus becomes a tool of resistance, allowing artists to bypass colonial story frames and imagine other possible futures.”
(From An Ba Lanme Curatorial Statement)
Most Photos Credited to: Adeline Rapon, An ba Lanme project 2026
