#umoya

Shannon Alonzo is an interdisciplinary artist who I came across in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial uMoya, focusing primarily on drawing, soft sculpture and performance.

Her practice explores themes of collective belonging, place attachment, historical erasure and the significance of carnival ritual to the Caribbean consciousness.

'Mangrove' (2023)

Referencing the entangled forms of Mangroves – a group or system of trees and roots which grow in coastal, tropical climates – Alonzo has created a site-specific mural of charcoal and paint which explores the Caribbean Carnival’s relationship to space: claimed and embodied, geographic and ideological.

Like the mangroves of Trinidad, an enmeshed root system living on the fringes of land and sea, the Carnival has historically provided a place of refuge and stabilization for countless marginalised peoples. Now taking place in various countries across the world, including places which were once foreign and hostile lands, Carnival celebrations exist to resist myriad forms of racial injustice and institutionalized oppression; a space for people of the Caribbean diaspora to assert their right to joy, self-articulation, agency, dignity, and ancestral legacy.

The motif of the Mangrove also pays homage to Frank Crichlow, a community activist and civil rights campaigner who became known as the ‘Godfather of Black Radicalism’ in London in 1960’s. Crichlow owned the infamous Mangrove Restaurant – a space of refuge for activists and creatives of the Windrush generation in Notting Hill, which also served as the informal head office for the Carnival.

Central to the mural is Elma Francois, a little known but revolutionary figure who began her journey picking cotton alongside her mother at an early age. The poor treatment she witnessed sparked her interest in workers’ rights, leading her to become a leader in critical labour movements of the1930’s in Trinidad, which spread throughout the Caribbean. Here, she claims space in the Cotton Exchange Building, bringing a divine feminine energy to a formerly male environment, driven by capitalist ideology. Her presence, alongside Alonzo’s ritual of erasing and redrawing the mural part way through the exhibition, is an offering to catalyse healing and a restoration of balance. Figures within the mural blur in and out of focus, acting as a nod to rhythm and movement but also emphasising the fragility of histories which are passed on through oral or performance storytelling. In places, it is difficult to tell where the figures end and the Mangrove begins

On the 26-29 August 2023 I went to Liverpool to see the 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial titled ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’.

- Themed around a call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge and wisdom in the biennial

- In the isiZulu language, ‘uMoya’ means spirit, breath, air, climate and wind

- More than 30 international artists and collectives have been invited to engage with this years theme

- Liverpool Biennial uMoya 2023 was curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa

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