Rhea Storr

Who has the authority to speak about a given culture? 

Junkanoo Talk investigates the language of celebration through carnival. I am interested in carnival as subversive act, an outlet for parody or satire and abstraction employed in the service of cultural identity, obscuring or revealing an author. The work explores a culturally ambiguous standpoint and seeks to avoid a fetishization of the so called 'other'. Through colour and gesture I seek a near forensic way of looking, yet the viewer is systematically denied the full picture. 

As part of the Bahamian diaspora, I have experienced the carnival only through mediated imagery, through first hand accounts, the internet and television. Colour is coded in a way which suggests an internal logic, the layering on of a costume comparative to the layering on of a language. At the start of the film James Baldwin is quoted, who speaks in this instance of the complexities of being an African American in France whilst the costume shown employs a technique of cutting crepe paper specific to Junkanoo, a carnival of the Bahamas.