drowning is, natalia vasquez
“drowning is” series by natalia vasquez
Archive for April, 2008
the periphery
“We are the periphery of the periphery.”
Jennifer Smit on Dutch Caribbean art. Interview part of Polvo’s TBA magazine on time-based art.
Jennifer Smit (1951) is an art historian and independent curator, residing in Curaçao. She was born on the island of Curaçao, she studied art history at the University of Amsterdam and graduated in 1980. She moved back to her native island in 1992. She has frequently curated Dutch Caribbean participation in exhibitions in the Caribbean region, such as Carivista in Barbados in 1998 and in 2000 the Bienal del Caribe in the Dominican Republic. Together with Adi Martis she wrote the first survey of the history of the visual arts of the Dutch Caribbean, Arte Dutch Caribbean Art, published in 2001. Presently she is a lecturer on non Western visual culture and art history at the Instituto Buena Bista, Curaçao Center for Contemporary Art. Frequently she lectures about Caribbean Art in Europe, the U.S. and the Caribbean region and has written extensively for local and Caribbean newspapers and journals about Dutch Caribbean art.
negro please/ the fuku
From, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (footnote on p.4)
“You want a final conclusive answer to the Warren Commission’s question, Who killed JFK? Let me, your humble Watcher, reveal once and for all the God’s Honest Truth: It wasn’t the mob or LBJ or the ghost of Marilyn Fucking Monroe. It wasn’t aliens or the KGB on a lone gunman. It wasn’t the Hunt Brothers of Texas of Lee Harvey or the Trilateral Commission. It was Trujillo; it was the fuku. Where in conazo do you think the so-called Curse of the Kennedys comes from? How about Vietnam? Why do you think the greatest power in the world lost its first war to a Third World country like Vietnam? I mean, Negro, please. It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.) A smashing military success for the U.S., and many of the same units and intelligence teams that took part in the “democratization” of Santo Domingo were immediately shipped off to Saigon. What do you think these soldiers, technicians, and spooks carried with then, in their rucks, in their suitcases, in their shirt pockets, on the hair inside their nostrils, caked up around their shoes. Just a little gift from my people to America, a small repayment for an unjust war. That’s right, folks, Fuku.”
