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The Architect of Impossible Physics<\/b><\/p>\n
By Simon Lee\u00a0 (aka ”The Inspector”)<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n It would be disingenuous to dissimulate, or in Trinidad parlance play \u201cthe mocking pretender\u201d (empty hyperbolic windbag) or even attempt to \u201cmamaguy\u201d (fool) those of you who have strayed from the drawings, an amazement unto themselves, into this textual morang and sometime meringue. What follows lays no claim to art criticism, although some of it might be. It is neither objective nor detached, as I have known the artist for close on 30 years, arriving in this Trinidada the same year as <\/span>The Architect of Impossible Physics<\/span><\/i> found his way onto the drawing board.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Disclaimers aside, what I can offer are some responses based on life experience and the accumulated research of more than 40 years into Caribbean culture, high and low, popular, folk, rootical, theoretical, historical and supernatural. That\u2019s some of the background, which would also include countless research trips and \u2018deep limes\u2019 across the entire region from Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and The Dominican Republic) and Jamaica in the north, all the way down south to Cayenne in Guyane (French Guyana) and the infamous Devil\u2019s Island. En route I\u2019ve met prime ministers and ganja farmers, fishermen and bush doctors, beer brewers and rum distillers, artists and vendors, Vodou, Kali and Orisha priests, cricketers and stickfighters, musicians and hitmen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0If you\u2019re into credentials, you\u2019ve just had some of mine, as I\u2019m convinced, unlike a distinguished academic who\u2019s widely recognized in academe as an expert on Haitian literature but has never set foot in Haiti, that to discuss, or comment on any aspect of culture, one must know the land and seascapes, the his and her stories of provenance and the people who made them. Position and context, point of view \u2013are all more than relevant. Any cultural theorizing or discourse, such as this, must be based on primary research. Organic, as opposed to the cerebral style of theory (largely western and burdened with such schismic titles as structuralism, post structuralism, post modernism, post colonialism) begins with the practice, from which theory is derived. Otherwise theory is disconnected, a cart before the proverbial horse, as practice does not conform to (existing) theory but begets it.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0And while the Caribbean is inextricably entangled with Western discourse and has produced postmodern analysis of culture \u2013notably Antonio Benitez-Rojo\u2019s <\/span>The Repeating Island<\/span><\/i>, Caribbean theory like Caribbean new knowledge is (must by definition) be generated here, which is the centre, rather than from a distant metropolis, which is peripheral to our purposes. As Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed observed in his seminal 1891 essay <\/span>Nuestra America <\/span><\/i>(which reclaims the name of the region from Yankee monopoly)<\/span> \u201cThe European university must bow to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught\u2026even if the archons of ancient Greece are overlooked. Our Greece must take priority over the Greece which is not ours. We need it more…Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the tree must be our own.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n One hundred years later Benitez-Rojo gives his brilliant analysis of Creole ontology, in his discussion of Fernando Ortiz\u2019s <\/span>Cuban Counterpoint<\/span><\/i>, which he suggests should be read as a \u2018dialogic and uncentered text:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Of course, according to the canons of Western scientific thought, much of what there is in the Contrapunteo is absurd, irrational, fantastic. But one must admit that the same could be said from the other side, if one looked from the periphery towards the centres of disciplinary power, although the periphery, it should be said, tends to be more tolerant. Nevertheless, given its logocentric character, Western theoretical thinking discards any relativist schema and says merely that certain Caribbean points of view \u201cdon\u2019t hold up under modern analysis\u2019 or are marginal to postmodernity\u2019s \u201cbrainstorm\u201d. One example among many would be the importance that Ortiz gives to the impact of African beliefs in the Caribbean.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u2026We can understand better if we see that African beliefs don\u2019t limit themselves to the worshipping of a given group of deities, but rather inform an authentic body of sociocultural practices extending through a labyrinth of referents as diverse as music, dance, theatre, song, dress, hairstyle, crafts, oral literature, systems of divination, medical botany, magic, ancestor cults, pantomime, trance states, eating customs, agricultural practices, relations with animals, cooking, commercial activity, astronomical observation, sexual behaviour, and even the shapes and colours of objects. Religion in black Africa is not something that can be separated from,\u00a0 distinguished from history, since it is, in itself, history; we\u2019re dealing here with a discourse that permeates all human activity and interferes in all practices.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n We will find resonances of \u2018the absurd, irrational, fantastic\u2019 throughout <\/span>The Architect of Impossible Physics<\/span><\/i>, which I suggest works on several levels like Ortiz\u2019s Contrapunteo to create and interrogate Creole space, the magical real or tropical baroque; an iconography-cum-epistemology, a mythology grounded in the specific eco-scape of Trinidad yet constantly shifting, drifting in the same Caribbean Sea which embraces, unites and separates the repeating islands.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another relevant theorist much closer to home is the Trinidadian C.L.R. James, whose pioneering work in conceptualizing Creole ontology, displacing the dominant Western narrative and centering the periphery is still under-recognized. \u2018To establish his own identity, Caliban\u2026must pioneer into regions Caesar never knew\u2019, James wrote in the preface to his seminal text <\/span>Beyond A Boundary<\/span><\/i>, which has as much claim to being the first Cultural Studies text (cricket as visual art, drama, field of racial and class analysis) as Alejo Carpentier\u2019s <\/span>Kingdom of This World<\/span><\/i> (1949) does to be the first magical realism text \u2013rather than Marquez\u2019s <\/span>100 Years of Solitude<\/span><\/i> (1966). Formally educated in the English public school system (by Oxbridge ex-pat teachers at Queen\u2019s Royal College, Port-of-Spain) James would free himself from mental slavery; \u2018It was only long years after that I understood the limitation on our spirit, vision and self respect that was imposed on us by the fact that our masters, our curriculum\u2026everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and leading and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n James challenged Western historiography and virtually single-handedly established Caribbean historiography in the Anglophone Caribbean with his <\/span>Black Jacobins <\/span><\/i>(1938), a ground-breaking study of the Haitian Revolution, in which he argued that the beginning of modern Caribbean History dates from 1804, when the ex-slaves won independence, rather than from the 1492 arrival of Columbus. In his \u2018yard literature\u2019 -the early short story Triumph (1927) and novel Minty Alley (1936) -James privileged Creole barrack yard popular culture, documenting and celebrating this site in much the same way he celebrated the Creole space of the cricket pitch, which to West Indian spectators in the twentieth century was much more than simply a playing field: \u2018I know that to tens of thousands of coloured Trinidadians the unquestioned glory of St Hill\u2019s batting conveyed the sensation that here was one of us, performing in excelsis in a sphere where competition was open. It was a demonstration that atoned for pervading humiliation and nourished pride and hope.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0So that\u2019s some of my theoretical framework, not forgetting my pal Ant\u00e9nor Firmin (the Haitian anthropologist and friend of Marti), the original Creole Confederate and the man who trounced European pseudo-scientific racism- \u00e0 la Gobineau-<\/span> with his <\/span>De l’\u00e9galit\u00e9 des races humaines<\/span><\/i> (On the Equality of the Human Race –<\/span>“all men are endowed with the same qualities and the same faults, without distinction of color or anatomical form. The races are equal”<\/span>).<\/span><\/p>\n And<\/span> the final theorist up for consideration who I find most relevant to our relational Creole subject, is the Martiniquan \u00c9douard Glissant (classmate of Franz Fanon and student of Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire at the Lycee Schoelcher, Martinique), whose concept of Antillanit\u00e9, or Caribbeanness, engages so productively with the concept of rhizomic or horizontal, rather than vertical roots and does much to frame the region\u2019s inherent chaos and paradoxical nature. Vertically we\u2019re divided by language, different colonial histories, politics, but horizontally we share common experiences \u2013of pre-Columbian history and indigenous societies, genocide, slavery, indentureship, resistance, Afro-Creole religions and cultural expressions \u2013and most significantly by the process of\u00a0 \u00a0 creolization, which is the dynamic driving Caribbeanness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Hybridity, transculturation, mestizaje, creolization – all terms which attempt definitions of the indefinable, although creolization (in its early sense of \u2018made in the Caribbean\u2019) says it best. Whether the analogy for this incessant (in- and un-intentional) mixing is Fernando Ortiz\u2019s ajiaco (a soup of limitless combinations) or the favoured callaloo of the eastern Caribbean, the mix<\/span> defines the Caribbean, and defies to the point of irrelevance notions of purity (racial as well as cultural), essentialism and fundamentalism, which is fanaticism\u2019s ally. The linearity of western rationalism is constantly contradicted by the ebb and flow of the sea \u2013everything is moving; our \u2018magical reality\u2019 mocks the stasis and limitations of western thought, which is why chaos theory is so relevant to our spaces. As Haitian polymath, writer and multi-media artist Frank\u00e9tienne who <\/span>rejects realism and embraces disorder, finding order in chaos says: \u201cI am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Moving from theoretical background \u2013which will give you a contextualising handle if you want one- we\u2019ll slide sidewise, rhizomically to the personal <\/span>foreground<\/span>. <\/span>In this foreground I place a friendship, which has evolved through mutual respect, many libations, culinary concoctions and a shared love of and fascination with Sans Souci, a heartland haven on Trinidad\u2019s Atlantic blasted north coast, one of those unique and special places in life\u2019s landscape. The name itself resonates through Caribbean history- the fabulous palace constructed by crazy King Henri Christophe, one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution which realized the potential of the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution\u2019s ideals of liberty, equality and universality, only to perpetrate fresh horrors on its own people, as we can read in the first text of \u201cthe magical real\u201d, Alejo Carpentier\u2019s <\/span>The Kingdom of this World<\/span><\/i> or in Edouard Glissant\u2019s play <\/span>Monsieur Toussaint.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/i>Trinidad\u2019s Sans Souci \u2013 the place of \u2018no worries\u2019 – has a far less august history than that of the ruins of a dream in northern Haiti, which remain to contradict the motto of its founder- Je renais de mes cendres (I arise from my ashes). Yet this small village, peopled by descendants of Vincentians and Grenadians brought into the island to secure votes, is as contradictory as its Haitian namesake. The visual and topographical clich\u00e9s of Caribbean tourism \u2013pristine white sands, still warm aquamarine waters \u2013 are challenged by the ever roaring ocean which can swallow you in the blink of an eye, the jagged black rocks where rip tides will smash and lacerate you, by the dense rainforest which drops sheer to the beach, where rainstorm beating on galvanise summons Shango drums.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Elemental land, sea and soundscape dominate Sans Souci, just as they shape all aspects of Caribbean culture and its diverse expressions, whether oral, visual, written, sung, danced or played. Thankfully Sans Souci is way off any beaten track, far behind God\u2019s back. It requires effort to get there \u2013 a three-hour drive from Port-of-Spain, on serpentine roads so easy to slip off if you don\u2019t know the way. When you reach the inconsequential village straddling the road after Big Bay there are no bijou beach bars serving tropical cocktails, although you\u2019ll hear Roots Reggae or ragged Seventh Day Adventist hymns drifting through the trees, mingling with the ocean\u2019s incessant percussion. Here you are stripped of all comfortable clich\u00e9s, here is only monumental sea and forest, a kinetic vision, which if you allow, will slough off all veneers, beginning with ridiculous anthropocentrism, that foolish conceit of our own importance, as though the world this little speck of infinity, revolves around us.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Were I (who to my cost already am<\/span> (Satyr on Mankind \u2013John Wilmot Earl of Rochester)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The gift and spirit of Sans Souci reminds us of both our insignificance (the ocean will still be roaring, the high woods reaching for the stars in clear night skies, king corbeaux riding warm air currents overhead, long after we have gone), and also the significance of our place in the landscape.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0The journey to Sans Souci can be a pilgrimage but when you reach there is no escape. The place confronts you, Sans Souci in your face, your ears, a thousand mosquitoes and breeze on your skin. For hermit or artist, musician or writer this is far more than a retreat, or refuge. There are no distractions beyond sea song and leaf storm; but you can spend an afternoon listening to the groans of ancient mahogany, harmonizing with the surf. Souci will embrace you with its challenge, as ceaseless as the incipient threat of ocean, sometimes, in rare moments as flat as ironed sheets but ready at wind gust to churn and wrench, a cavalcade of sea elephants trumpeting, trampling, stampeding to shore.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Shadow on the shore <\/b>(181216)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Shadow on the shore<\/span><\/p>\n Line wavers smashed and shuddered<\/span><\/p>\n By ocean\u2019s fury<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0I first met Eddie back in 1989 when I worked in an advertising agency next door to the Crossover Designs office\/gallery where he was based on Woodford Street, in the genteel decrepitude of Woodbrook, Port-of-Spain\u2019s gingerbread suburb. In my late thirties and self-exiled (rootless and confused as my pappi would say) from England, I was new to the capital, having spent the previous two years in the east, where I initially taught at a secondary school as a Commonwealth Exchange teacher. A former friend, now turned virulent enemy, once accused me in Sans Souci of all places of \u201cbeing on safari\u201d in Trinidad and the Caribbean. He was wrong, as unlike many Motherlanders, I had no intention of returning either to the UK or Europe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Unlike the Lord Kitchener, London was not the place for me, even if I was born there. Of Russian and Polish Jewish extraction, England always felt alien to me; I didn\u2019t get the sensibility (the climate and food didn\u2019t help). I can still recall the immense relief I experienced on a hitch hiking tour of Morocco during a long summer vacation from university, when I climbed a peak in the Rif Mountains and surveyed the distant Mediterranean Sea, which separated me from Europe, which I willingly shed, like unwanted old baggage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0With the same kind of ennui\/anomie, which I imagine demotivated nineteenth century fin de si\u00e8cle dilettantes, Orientalists and exoticists and then twentieth century wannabe avant gardists, assorted modernists, Dadaists and surrealists (Gaugin, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Dali, Breton and the mob of unusual suspects), by my teens I was weary of Europe and the west. A backdrop of the swinging sixties, anti-Vietnam War and anti-Apartheid demonstrations, Youth culture, expanded consciousness courtesy widely available drugs and the global consensus that the revolution was upon us and a brave new world imminent \u2013all impelled me to realize my childhood fantasy of finding my home in the kingdom of this world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0A period of dabbling in Trotskyism and then Buddhism was followed by an intense and much longer period of reading, African, Asian and Caribbean literature (initially as part of a project to introduce relevant texts to London\u2019s secondary schools and their disaffected ethnic minority students). My reading introduced me to Trinidad and the Caribbean. I spent hours on London\u2019s underground Circle line, transfixed by CLR James\u2019 Black Jacobins. Voraciously I gobbled down Ralph de Boissiere, Albert Gomes, Alfred Mendes, both Naipauls along with Selvon, Lovelace, Harold \u201cSonny\u201d Ladoo. Trinidad was calling and after several false starts I finally arrived in a hot green night. Within weeks I knew I had come home, had found my place in the world. Unconsciously at this stage, I began to construct my new \u2018Jewish Creole\u2019 identity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0When I stumbled up the stairs to Crossover Designs in 1989 and encountered Messrs Bowen and Ouditt, I found kindred spirits despite my decade and some seniority. What I didn\u2019t know then was that Eddie had only returned two years before from a long sojourn in England, where like other members of Trinidad\u2019s white or well-heeled elite, he\u2019d been sent aged seven to be educated. Like me he was trying to find his place and space, although unlike me his family roots in the Caribbean are several centuries old. Another coincidence which I missed early, was that Eddie had nurtured ambitions of being an architect (\u201cBut I suck at Maths\u201d) like my late father Maitre Levi, who went to view the first solo exhibition in London, of <\/span>The Architect of Impossible Physics<\/span><\/i> shortly after I wrote my first article about Eddie, previewing the show, which appears below.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Amazing Power of the Pencil<\/b><\/p>\n (Trinidad Sunday Guardian magazine July 25, 1993)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the process of psyching himself up for his October exhibition at the Aquarela Gallery, artist Eddie Bowen has returned to the drawing board. Already well known as one of the Caribbean\u2019s young experimental painters, Eddie has produced a series of 36 large-scale drawings, which range from the intricately symbolic to the satirically irreverent. He describes them as \u201can economic way to work towards composition and exercises digging into the imagination.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Glancing through the series in his St Ann\u2019s studio, while his sage cat Snowy puts to flight a friendly but silly puppy who has strayed into forbidden territory, one cannot help but recall the evaluation of his former Crossover Design colleague Steve Ouditt: \u201cThe man is a boss draughtsman, the best in the island.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Eddie himself seems pleased with the drawings, which are coming at the rate of two a day: \u201cI always go back to drawing, I have to get back to (what is) my bliss\u2026it\u2019s like turning on the TV, you have to tune it in; sometimes there\u2019s bad weather and you have to go back and re-tune.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n While he says that he begins each drawing with no preconceived ideas but merely with a scribble, the series reflects questions and research he has been engaged in recently and can be viewed as a meditation on the themes of inspiration and the creative power of prayer, the invoking of the gods of creativity and the imagination.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0In <\/span>The Architect of Impossible Physics<\/span><\/i> we can see a Buddha figure from whose eye a black tear is falling. The Buddha (or architect of the title) is weeping, explains Eddie, because these days he rarely gets to build amazing structures, like those which characterized the cultures of ancient civilizations, like the Mayas and the Incas.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0The Buddha\/architect sits above a row of symbols, his building blocks, because his ability to build \u201cimpossible structures\u201d derives from concepts contained in the symbols. To the left of the architect we see several of his amazing structures, which significantly rest on a layer of sand, conventionally regarded as the worst possible building foundation. The sand serves to emphasize the power of inspiration, the outrageous possibilities of creativity. Eddie draws attention to the Buddha\u2019s face: \u201cHe\u2019s not into <\/span>can\u2019t do<\/span><\/i>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0The series originated in collaboration with (fellow artist) Francisco Cabral. Eddie produced some drawings of figures in mas costumes for Cabral\u2019s initial work on his designs for next years\u2019s Barbarossa carnival band. The collaboration came to nothing but led Eddie directly into his series of drawings.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0In the process of returning full time to drawing he has found himself re-working themes and motifs, which appeared in the drawings he did when he first came back to Trinidad after (Croydon) art school in England. Those who are familiar with his paintings will see the extended imagery of basic shapes (the box, the circle) in the drawings along with a mixing of tropical and technological motifs, which reflect the modern Caribbean lifestyle.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0The titles, like the work are provocative, intense, humorous, satirical, mystical, densely wrought: <\/span>The Incredible Cocoon Machine, The Great Fried Chicken Scandal, A Seed Propagation Tank, The Tree That Bowed to the Yogi<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0The standard of draughtmanship, the intricacy of detail and the unleashing of a unique imagination demand that this series is exhibited in its own right.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Across the top of <\/span>The Great Fried Chicken Scandal<\/span><\/i> we read in Eddie\u2019s flowing hand \u201c\u2026in the dead of night, the imagination runs riot with possibility, things we\u2019d like to forget in the light of dawn\u2026\u201d His drawings attest to both the outrageous possibilities of the imagination and to the fact that, like the poet in Cocteau\u2019s film Orph\u00e9e, Eddie is attuned to his muse. After all, as he says, \u201cThe pencil can do amazing things if you push it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/b>Thirty years on, immersing myself in the extraordinary series of drawings, which I\u2019ve watched evolve, it occurs to me that in one way – there are many others- the <\/span>Architect of Impossible<\/span><\/i> Physics has come to represent Eddie\u2019s discovery and mapping of his vision(s) and continuous re-visioning of his place in this place\/space and a career in Fine Art practice, which he\u2019s made up, utilizing his Creole talent for improvisation. He\u2019s invented himself and a unique practice. Beginning with the early minimalist series, which he exhibited in London in 1993, he\u2019s been navigating, documenting and mapping those internal landscapes encountered and explored since he returned to Trinidad in 1986.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We move from the sparseness and single images of the early drawings, where he plays and experiments with basic shapes, like a child\u2019s building blocks, through the whimsical Heath Robinsonesque series of eco-machines and appliances for astral travel or holistic medicine devices (cf: Two devices and machines for the repair and restoration of angels\u2019 wings: discovered in Trinidad 12 October 2007) to the increasingly dense, baroquely intricate complexity of the dimension-defying landscapes of the last two decades. Like Chagall\u2019s Vitebsk, or RK Narayan\u2019s fictional Malgudi, Eddie has created his own world, complete with its own mythology (cf. The Jumbie Killer series), symbolism, an imaginary, which precisely because it is now so rooted, can be viewed universally.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Souci afternoon<\/b><\/p>\n All day long the old fisherman<\/span><\/p>\n Sits roadside mending his nets<\/span><\/p>\n At the parlour round the next bend<\/span><\/p>\n Matrons in white sit kerbside<\/span><\/p>\n Sampling their homemade ice cream.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I bought a $5 cornet<\/span><\/p>\n And took a walk into the valley<\/span><\/p>\n Looking for a house spot.<\/span><\/p>\n Followed the cold clear stream<\/span><\/p>\n Until I\u2019d\u2019ve had to ford it.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n On reflection I\u2019d prefer<\/span><\/p>\n Somewhere on this ridge<\/span><\/p>\n Overlooking the waves.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n For more than 30 years the Trinidadian artist Edward \u201cEddie\u201d, Bowen, familiarly known by this member of the Sans Souci Militia as Von Gusto, Busha, Rocket Man and other transient titles, which have slipped into the waves, has been producing a series of drawings, <\/span>The Architect of Impossible Physics<\/span><\/i>, which you\u2019ll encounter in some pages time. UK-based art critic Leon Wainright, a specialist in contemporary Caribbean art, contends that <\/span>The Architect <\/span><\/i>\u201cis possibly the single longest running series of work in the English Caribbean\u201d while the architect himself presents us with the vital lens through which we enter the series\u2019 labyrinth, affirming it \u201cwas inspired by Sans Souci; the drawings like Sans Souci have no end.\u201d We\u2019ll return endlessly to Sans Souci but for now we\u2019ll backtrack to the eighties.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Retour a Sans Souci <\/b>(240607)<\/span><\/p>\n Sitting on the back porch. The sea a smoothed expanse of aquamarines streaked with indigo. As cloud coverage shifts so do the sea\u2019s colours: from the bar below in the village, rain falling, it looked grey. The reflected body blow of the road\u2019s bare heat bit into bones. This spot has always been a retreat, sanctuary, refuge. Since I reach, the roar of the sea has been with me, a deep massage, expelling toxic vapours. Simbi I will paint you in the surf percussion.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Dialect of Hurricanes – Frank\u00e9tienne<\/b><\/p>\n Every day I use the dialect of lunatic hurricanes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I speak the madness of clashing winds.<\/span><\/p>\n Every evening I use the patois of furious rains.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I speak the fury of waters in flood.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Every night I talk to the Caribbean islands in the tongue of hysterical storms. I speak the hysteria of the rutting sea.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Dialect of hurricanes. Patois of rains. Language of tempests. Unravelling of the spiralling life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n La Pluie nan San Souci \u2013 synthanaesia suite<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is a basis for improvisation: over ambient sound track (1) a further sound layer (2) provides clave-rhythmic root track, over which live or recorded music can be dubbed (3).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Like the later drawings in <\/span>The Architect<\/span><\/i>, this project is endless. Any combination of musicians, or soloists can improvise their own responses to the first two tracks. The cumulative recordings will be a soundbank, as incessant as the sea at San Souci.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/i>Eddie began<\/span> The Architect <\/span><\/i>in 1987, as a young man, shortly after his return from \u201cexile\u201d in England in 1986, having graduated from Croydon Art School. The title for the series came six months after beginning but <\/span>The Architect\u2019s <\/span><\/i>essential open-endedness, its connections to the pre-historic past and infinity, the land and the sea were there from genesis: \u201cI knew I wasn\u2019t going to stop; maybe this doesn\u2019t have an end.\u201d 30 years on, we can view <\/span>The Architect <\/span><\/i>as one man\u2019s journey, a voyage into the fecund empty spaces of the imagination: \u201cIt\u2019s a bit like Alladin\u2019s cave \u2013 full of treasures. I\u2019ve been allowed in the cave; it\u2019s dark in there. It\u2019s like wearing a blindfold, feeling your way and drawing what you feel\u2026it\u2019s a kind of plastic darkness, you\u2019re not just groping at objects, but at the empty space.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0If the origins of <\/span>The Architect <\/span><\/i>are similar to those of Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s <\/span>
<\/span>One of those strange, prodigious<\/span> creatures, man)<\/span>
<\/span>A spirit free to choose, for my own share<\/span>
<\/span>What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,<\/span>
<\/span>I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,\u00a0<\/span>
<\/span>Or anything but that vain animal,<\/span>
<\/span>Who is so proud of being rational\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n