My colleagues Sean Leonard, Christopher Cozier, and I cherish this photo — taken in late 2006 by the Trinity College
exchange-student photographer Ivan R. Belcic — because it reminds us
that
Alice Yard began as, and remains, simply “a backyard on a small
island.” Ten years ago at
80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain, there was no
gallery, no residency living quarters, no annex studio space, no sign.
There was a paved yard with an old concrete laundry sink. There was a
physical location made available by Sean, and there was an
idea for a space where artists, musicians, and others could meet,
converse, exchange, make, perform, imagine, play. There was a name:
Alice Yard. There were many questions. There were many possibilities —
more than we could yet realise.
Ten years later — after hundreds of events and projects and actions,
performances and mas bands, thousands of conversations — Alice Yard is
still a Woodbrook backyard. It is still a space of questions and
possibilities. It is, thanks to Sean and his family, a space of radical
generosity. It is a space to investigate ideas of openness and
intellectual freedom. It is a space for play.
As we mark
Alice Yard’s tenth anniversary this month, “our instinct,” as we’ve written
elsewhere, “is less to celebrate and more to affirm our spirit of
investigation and exchange, our ethos of generosity and independence.”
My own predominating feelings are astonishment — ten years! how? — and
enduring gratitude: to
Sean and Chris, to the innumerable others who
have entered and engaged in some way with our space, and for the
immeasurable enrichment of my own thought and imagination over the past
decade.
After ten years, we still have no idea where this will go: that’s the most exciting thing of all.
