Creating these connections through a collaged aesthetic, kaersenhout creates a new visual language, a new genealogy of visuality perhaps, from which she is able to commemorate – by bringing them out of the margins – these Afro-Caribbean women. Their commemoration, like historical portraits, grounds them while allowing them the space to transcend the limits of particularity, the limits of their erasure. Printed on cotton – a material for which, and by which, colonial violence was enacted across the Caribbean – these prints reassemble the relationship between visual representation, forms of memory and histories of colonial violence. They reimagine and reenact new histories of Afro-Caribbean women’s work on the ground that these erasures took place. Beginning from the site in which women’s bodies were unthought – erased and this erasure formed into history – Food For Thought envisages an alternative assemblage of visuality that centers the role of Black women in our perceptions of the Caribbean.

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exerpt from: The Grounds of Erasure: patricia kaersenhout’s Archival Vision
by Anna Arabindan-Kesson