#FragileRoutes
For Hello From The Other Side Gario is presenting #FragileRoutes. Bought at the low budget department store Daily Style the materials used bring into focus the transport of goods and the lives that are touched and changed. Each individual black pyramid was cut from a larger decorative sticker for usage on walls and then placed on an A4 sheet with stickers for precious cargo. Each A4 sheet is unique and no two people will receive the same route when the box arrives. With the work Gario continues his research on the reflection on Blackness, migration, improvisation and practices of refusal. The work is inspired by the seminal work being done by Saadiya Hartmann, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten and Julius S. Scott. #FragileRoutes is part of a series that came about through research on the Sudanese saint St. Maurice who is the patron saint of the Blackheads Brotherhood. The work thinks through and imagines the routes that he might have traveled from Meroë, a region of the world with the highest density of pyramids, and the Swiss Alps where he martyred himself to save a Christian village. The series invites critical speculation about his life and proposes other ways of fleshing out his story beyond his function for the ideological production of images and stories after his canonization in the 9th Century. With the work Gario is inviting those who receive the stickers to walk the same route in their neighborhoods or their cities and remember and document what they encounter. The work asks how we relate to our surroundings and propose ways to refuse dominant narratives with the simplest of means.
The handmade piece of work created by Quinsy Gario will only be made in 80 copies, meaning only the first 80 tickets sold (to people living in Belgium) will have the work included in the package.
Biography
Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten, two island that share continued Dutch colonial occupation. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario’s most well-known work is Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012). As a member of the collective Family Connection established in 2005 by Glenda Martinus and Gala Martinus, respectively his mother and aunt, his current research is attempting to institute another way of archiving. He is a Utrecht University media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies alumnus and a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague. He is a 2017 Humanity in Action Detroit Fellow, 2017/2018 BAK Fellow, 2019/2020 APASS participant and a 2020/2021 Sandberg Institute Critical Studies Fellow. Gario received the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, The Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe 12 Theatermakers Prize 2011. His work has been shown in among other places Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), MACBA (Barcelona), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MHKA (Antwerp), TENT (Rotterdam) and Göteborgs Konsthall (Gothenburg). Gario is also currently running for Dutch parliament as a candidate for the political party BIJ1.