Focusing on urban sites including Bridgetown, Barbados; Paramaribo, Suriname; and Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Leon Wainwright contributed to the Spring 2016 Architecture and History, Theory and Criticism Lecture Series (HTC Forum), in the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with support from the Lipstadt-Stieber Fund.
The Caribbean offers a useful vantage point onto current controversies about the materiality of culture and the geography of movement. Where the rhetoric of globalisation has taken hold in the public funding and exhibiting of contemporary art, artists have come to experience a mixed picture of the opportunities that are posed by global flows of money, artworks and the ideas about them. Dr Wainwright’s presentation shows the impact of ideas of creativity as a means of exchange between urban sites and the terms of art’s contemporaneity, in a pattern of movement that can be illuminated by a political geography of the Caribbean.
Watch the presentation in full here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQjrqGtPuFs