Immersive Retrospective Meditation

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

The meditation stems from a coping mechanism which helped me to deal with anxiety at a young age. I found that through a balance of tranquility and sharp inward focus, I could mentally project myself to places that made me feel calm and safe. I would often transport myself to quiet beaches on Aruba where I’d never find any strangers and I’d be there in my mind: lying in the hot sand after a swim, watching waves roll on and off the shore and I’d nearly feel the beaming sun drying the salty water off my skin as if I was really there. Now that so many beaches on the island are invested with tourists, littered with their trash and sediments of ocean plastic, these places exist now only in memory. The ability to vividly revisit these memories and shift one’s sense of reality now 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 and environmental harm.

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

April 2024