n collaboration with Current IV Caribe: "Otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua", a program curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel for TBA21, Camila Marambio writes this chronicle about the latest gathering in Portland, Jamaica: "repetition, variability, memory, writing, repair, and restoration."

What follows is a deeply moved, incomplete testimony of my time at Convening #2, a two-day art and relational event in Jamaica curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel. I offer these reflections as a partial witness, conscious of the limits of my gaze, the asymmetry of relations, and the invitation to sit with complexity rather than solve it.

 Day 0: Thursday, January 9
Trans Caribbean Movement
Travel and arrival

After a cold jelly and sweet June plums outside Kingston’s airport, Denis drives the backroads. Dancehall on the radio. The night folds in. The road curves. Somewhere, detergent-scented bungalows.

We arrive at Port Antonio, on the northern edge of the island. Just outside town, above the quiet bay that cradles the Alligator Head Foundation. But this is not her story. Put at the center two red-headed woodpeckers, a dancer, a tiny giant, the fire, the poetry, the shared meal, el machete.

The Caribbean fractures are not tectonic. Not oceanic. They are colonial. Pressure points in the bones of islands. Debts unsettled, still collecting interest. It runs in river-veins beneath the skin of body-lands, seeping out in flavor, color, syncopation.

Disorientation is strategy. Perderse un poco. Don’t look at me unless I call you in. The mountain stirring soft unrest in the gut.

Logistics. Visas. Jamaican breakfast. La villa. La corriente. Improvisation. Siempre improvisación.

Across the road, mangroves woven tight. Conversations without end. The clock ticks with care, not urgency. In my notebook: time is care.

Code-switch. Is it possible to decolonize? ¿Brincar por encima de la fragmentación colonial? Freedom is muscle and breath. It rises from the bushfood, from roots that refuse to straighten, from movement without permission, from a way of life that compensates for what was taken and keeps being taking.

Jamaica’s independence came in 1962, says a new friend, over jerk chicken, ackee, yams, then a swim at Winnifred Beach—one of the few beaches left open to all, most are blocked behind pay-to-play gates.

No McDonald’s here. No Burger King. Relief tastes like fresh ginger and salt air.

What is liberation?
Not urbanization. Not five-star resorts. Here they ask me: Porto Rico—is that the US?

Warm air. Public buses. Dreaded mangroves whisper that the future is a braid of salt threads. Pido permiso. Pido guía.

Blessings, ja man. One love. Languages fold over one another. Details slip and resurface.

Allspice. Nutmeg. I do not want Empire. There is an outside. Maybe this is it.

Shoes wet. Salt cod heavy. Everyone signs. No bottled coconut water.

I am called “Whitey.” I let it sit. I walk quiet, keeping tempo. Present to witness. 

Day 1: Friday, January 10
Blue and John Crow Mountains
Closed research group

My title for the day is Honoring the Archipelagic.

“Everything we are surrounded by was once beneath the ocean,” Monique Johnson reminds us.

She invites us to journey back in time to the geological origins of the Jamaican Blue and John Crow Mountains, leading us along Cunha Cunha Pass, an eight-kilometer trail along the ridge connecting the Rio Grande Valley in Portland with Hayfield in Saint Thomas.

I’ve written before about Monique’s geosemiosis: her geological intelligence expressed with tenderness, through the vivid deep-time movements of oceanic subduction, migrating plates, rising magma pushing against the Earth’s skin, pillow lava, and the pressures and compressions that birthed the Caribbean rim. (A poem inspired by her eruptive language appears in my chronicle of Convening #1.)

Repetition, variability, remembrance, redaction, repair, and restoration are the moving parts of the improvisation taking place during Convening #2. I am a recurrence; naturally, I gravitate toward the current.

One hundred and forty million years ago, terrestrial snails would have evolved from marine organisms finding themselves on dry land after a mass extinction event, perhaps triggered by volcanic eruption or earthquake. Flowering plants came after. Ethnobotany—the study of how plants and people co-evolve—zooms out to show this long arc of entanglement. The Blue and John Crow Mountains speak of resilience, of a spirit that does not surrender, but becomes endemic, native, and place-specific. This bio-cultural survival becomes a knowledge practice not focused on what plants are “for,” but on how they are perceived. “Plants have relations with spirits,” says Ina Vanderbroek, accompanied by her teacher and partner, the Maroon farmer Jason West. 

Two leaves fall from my notebook; I try to remember their names and recall that naming, too, can be a colonial act. Some plants hide when called by the names imposed upon them. Categorization and utility often obscure reverence and relational respect.

Plants are important to people.

Ina has studied patterns of traditional knowledge systems across the Caribbean, following the diasporic migrations of plants. Everything is connected: mountain tops to ocean floors, forest to sea. At the top of Cunha Cunha Pass, we are far from urban pollution. The bush, as it’s called in Jamaica, is vigorous and full of life. During slavery and in the ongoing hardships of rural life, the bush has provided refuge, food, medicine, sacred teachings, and secrecy. Wild roots, blue ties, clinging vines, callaloo, search-me-heart.

These teachings, infused with psycho-spiritual wisdom and matriarchal social organization, became a living curriculum, a process of ongoing liberation. “The forced enslavement of Indigenous peoples and later Africans, illegally brought to the Caribbean, created a clan of guerrilla warriors who were never conquered: the Maroons,” says Maurice Lee, founder of Kromanti Experience. His work reconnects people from the African diaspora to their heritage beyond the narrative lens of slavery. The sharing of Indigenous land knowledge with African warrior strategies gave rise to the first Maroon students, masters of camouflage in communion with the hills. “Marronage is not a historical moment, but a way of life that grows from relationality, reciprocity, and struggle. Cunha Cunha Pass became not just a route, but a freedom movement.”

We walk among clouds that cling to trees. The bush smells both sweet and sour. We tire; the road is longer than expected. I silently thank the libation—it secures our safe return. Before the final stretch of quiet endurance, O’Neil Lawrence pauses to show us colonial paintings of the John Crow Mountains, where European artists attempted to tame the wild with orderly depictions. Contemporary artists relate differently, he explains. The mountain is not a possession, but a being with soul, capable of dialogue. “Bush have ears.” In communion, I leave a part of myself behind. This relational poetics is the opposite of mapping: it’s bodies interacting, not one extracting from the other.

That night, I sleep deeply, knowing a piece of me now lives forever in the Blue and John Crow Mountains.

Day 2: Saturday, January 11
Alligator Head Foundation, Port Antonio, Portland
All activities are free of charge and open to the public

Yina Ximénez opens the Festival with an invitation that feels both warm and challenging:

"Thank you for accepting the invitation to be here and to do together—and in 'do' I include thinking, sitting, talking, relaxing, getting uncomfortable, tasting, swimming, moving."

She explains that this festival is part of The Current IV, focused on the Caribbean and led by her through the research project otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua (other mountains, adrift beneath the waves). The Current is a key program of TBA21-Academy, supporting long-term curatorial and artistic research through three milestones: first, internal collective work (Flotations); second, public gatherings in the form of Convenings; and third, an exhibition of commissioned works by Tessa Mars and Nadia Huggins.

She asks, "What are the ideas that made up The Current IV?" And then answers herself with clarity and humility:

We aim to contribute to contemporary emancipatory processes in the region by strengthening relationships with the Ocean—a material and conceptual space that transcends the binary and rigid structures imposed on us. We seek to position an oceanic perspective of the Caribbean, rather than a deterministic, land-based view. This brings us to another objective: identifying and learning from the aesthetic strategies linked to marronage, such as improvisation. Through local reconfigurations of improvisation, practiced in the mountains above sea level, we might approach inhabiting the mountains below the Caribbean Sea—the submerged landscapes that move constantly, like the Ocean itself. Today, we will rehearse improvisation between water and land. I am deeply grateful to Yewande for taking up this challenge and creating this moment.

9:30 am–11:30 am 

Motion Workshop Listening With Our Bodies: A Movement Workshop on Land and Sea

The workshop unfolds with tenderness. I sense Yewande’s nerves, but also her openness. At one point, we don life vests and step onto the pier. She asks us to hum, a simple act of vibration that roots us in breath and body. We wade into the water, where buoyancy begins. At the bay's silty bottom, the texture feels familiar. In Borikén, we call it babote: mangrove peat, slow decomposition feeding the roots. I feel its murkiness around my pale skin and remember that maroon communities in Puerto Rico, like those in Loíza and El Caño Martín Peña, found refuge in mangroves. Their twisting roots and sulfurous scent offered protection from those who hunted them. Here, secrecy became survival, and improvisation became liberation.

Yewande’s voice reminds us: "Don’t move into pain or injury. Lean into sound. Extend energy."

Marronage meant constant movement: cooking with minimal smoke, pounding cacao into travel lozenges, hiding farming practices. This ingenuity still lives today in those resisting colonial impositions. Maroons were not simply escaped slaves; they were strategists of survival, inheritors of Indigenous evasion practices. Before Africans were enslaved, Taíno peoples across the Caribbean already knew how to vanish into landscapes. Their mostly plant-based diets and low-smoke cooking methods (like jerk pits) were born of necessity and brilliance. Stush in the Bush, the vegan collective feeding us during the festival, calls this “ancestral ground.”

4:10 pm–5:00 pm — Roundtable Conversation

Moderated by Yina Jiménez Suriel, artist Oneika Russell and curator O’Neil Lawrence discuss the Caribbean’s fraught relationship with the Ocean. They speak not in abstraction, but from lived experience: fear, beauty, displacement, and access.

"I live where you vacation," says Oneika, a phrase that cuts through tourist fantasy to expose underlying tensions.

Their conversation echoes the themes of the 2024 Kingston Biennial, curated by Ashley James and O’Neil Lawrence. As this event, Oneika’s watercolors present what she calls a pseudo-scientific meditation on futures where islands remain deliberately “underdeveloped,” outside the logic of extraction and ownership.

To flip the script of capitalist immediacy, Oneika’s art, O’Neil’s curatorial vision, and Yina’s questions breathe emotional resistance. Racial profiling shapes who can access beachfronts. The supposed freedom of the shore is gated by class and color. Oneika’s work becomes an invitation to imagine place-making as an act of reclaiming presence, of composing memories before the Ocean is lost.

I walk down to the water again before returning to a listening circle with Nohora Arrieta Fernández and Annie Paul.

5:00 pm–6:30 pm —  Hiding in Plain Sight: Strategies of Marronage

Nohora and Annie’s conversation—part poetry, part dialogue—becomes a quiet climax. They evoke Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics: the understanding that Caribbean unity is submarine, flowing beneath the visible.

Annie reminds us that we have not yet truly engaged with Brathwaite’s ways of knowing—his attention to everyday ripples, his discomfort with inherited paradigms. He turned to jazz and steelpan music, finding a language for fugitive thought in syncopation and improvisation. His typographic experiments—what Annie calls "typographic terrorism"—refuse domestication by colonial publishers. 

Junior Wedderburn’s musical accompaniment shifts the conversation toward Quilombismo: the philosophy of maroon communities in Brazil where collective life outweighs individualism. The poem calls us together, says Nohora, reading “Ignota Ternura” by Ana Victoria Padilla Onatra. The poem listens and looks; it moves in opacity.

Opacity, a right demanded by Martinican poet Édouard Glissant, resists forced legibility. Maroons erased footprints so they could not be followed. The black ink stain on Marcelo D’Salete’s comics ambushes the page.

In the final performance, What I Hide by My Language, My Body Utters, Yewande channels syncopation and flight. She grows, spins, pulses—dressed like a queen. She becomes the world and remakes it. History starts anew. Philip Ambolele Henry’s drum calls, the body answers. It is now the symbiocene.