Immersive Retrospective Meditation

As part of the research for Poesia Dolorosso, a series of ceramic sculptures representing artefacts from memories of lost Caribbean places, Sandy developed a guided medition to awaken her interviewees’ visual imagination. This excercise she coined “Immersive Retrospective Meditation” which she would perform with participants before receiving their recollections.

The meditation stems from a coping mechanism once evolved out of a need for Sandy to deal with anxiety at a young age. She found that through a balance of tranquility and sharp inward focus, she could mentally project herself into the places she most cherised. She would often transport herself to quiet beaches on Aruba where she’d never find any strangers and she’d be there in her mind: lying in the hot sand after a swim, watching waves roll on and off the shore as the beaming sun dries the salty water off her skin. Now that so many beaches on the island are invested with tourists, littered with their trash and the sediments of marine debris, these places (which have also largely gone undocumented too) exist now only in memory. The ability to vividly revisit them and shift one’s sense of reality becomes a way to cope with a different kind of pain: the aching nostalgia felt by so many Caribbeans for the places they lost to capitalist ventures.

The meditation was performed with an audience at Felix Meritis during a program called Living Room Session hosted by curator Shaquille Shaniqua Joy.

April 2024