The name taki mati translates playfully to ‘talking, branching, and friending’ in various creole languages // Nduykan, Sranan Togo, and Papamiento(u) // spoken in Suriname, Aruba, and Curaçao.
This online version is a visual conversation among artist friends, exploring imagery across the Caribbean region.
taki mati began as an online map in 2014 called Caribbean Art Space, started by Fresh Milk. It continues to function as an interactive map and working directory for artists and students discovering art spaces in the region. taki mati grows from this geography and network, as an ongoing collection of images and text to come back to, like a local library. Nested in each taki ‘branch’ are bookmarks or links to videos, articles, interviews, artist and exhibition websites, and downloads (PDFs).
taki mati uses a blog, map, radio, and newsletter to publish and stay in touch. Little gestures and ongoing experiments that are being built around ‘talking, branching, and friending’ with Caribbean art spaces.
Kayla Archer is a writer and investigator from Barbados based in Mexico City, curious about what Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite described as “the submarine unity” of the Caribbean-Latin American region. She seeks to explore the micro-connections of this region through collective memory, the nexus of arts and ecology, and the history and politics of resistance to colonial logics. She graduated from Leiden University with a BA in International Studies, and earned a diploma in Art History at the Centro de Arte Mexicano. She works for the Caribbean arts platform Fresh Milk as content specialist and coordinator of the Slow Reading Programme, as well as a collaborator at the community-run cultural center in Coyoacán, Mar de Lava. She volunteers for the green art lab alliance, a self-organised web of art organisations contributing to environmental sustainability. She co-creates poems dedicated to the defense of the deep-sea with the collective she founded, Orchestras of Awe/dacity, who's video performance has been featured at the National Gallery of Jamaica in the exposition "Our Collective Seabed" curated by Deep Currents Collective.
Katherine Kennedy is a Barbadian cultural practitioner. She graduated from Lancaster University, UK, and has taken part in exhibitions and residencies locally, regionally and internationally. Since 2011, she has worked for the Fresh Milk Art Platform, Barbados where is currently Director of Programmes, and has co-managed projects such as the former Caribbean Linked residency & exhibition programme and the Transoceanic Visual Exchange (TVE) video, film and new media exhibitions.
Katherine's visual practice is heavily tied to a sense of place, using interplay between organic and inorganic materials and imagery to interrogate the spectrum of belonging and displacement in different environments or cultural contexts. Her writing has appeared in publications such Caribbean InTransit and Robert & Christopher Publishers’ A-Z of Caribbean Art. In 2021, she was selected for the CCCADI Afro-Caribbean Art Curatorial Fellowship. She is currently a part-time history/theory tutor in the Division of Fine Arts at Barbados Community College.
Kriston Chen is a graphic designer who makes books and websites in Trinidad and Tobago. He runs a risograph print and design workspace called Toof Press. He graduated from Parsons The New School of Design and holds a Masters in Public Health from Tulane University. His work has been published and mentioned in ARC Magazine, Small Axe Journal, Caribbean Beat, Draconian Switch, and Caribbean Review of Books. Kriston manages #1000mokos, a stilt-walking/moko jumbie project in Trinidad and Tobago and is a member of Alice Yard, an arts collective based in Belmont, Port of Spain.
Email us at takimati@freshmilkbarbados.com