Serpentine Cinema presents The World’s Womb, a film programme focussing on Caribbean ecologies.
Inspired by Malcolm Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology, this series of moving image works explore Caribbean ecologies, intricately linking decolonial and environmental discourses to underscore their inherent connections. Illuminating the complexities of the Plantationocene, the artists featured in this programme— Minia Biabiany, Ayesha Hameed, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Hope Strickland— unravel the fragmented, yet intimately intertwined, histories of the Caribbean and wider Atlantic.
Challenging linear conceptions of time to transcend temporal boundaries, these artists confront the enduring violence inflicted upon the Caribbean’s land and its people. Simultaneously, they highlight the region’s ongoing role as a site of refuge and resistance. The works bring the region’s pasts into the present to reveal the land and sea as sites of extractivism, memory and revival. By reconceptualising the Caribbean as a vital source of knowledge and insight—a microcosm of the world’s histories and futures—they expose its deep entanglement with global ecological and social systems. These films force us to confront the ongoing and interconnected impact of colonialism and environmental degradation, urging a re-evaluation of our relationship with these seemingly idyllic spaces— and with each other.
The World’s Womb is a call to action. The programme advocates for a more just and sustainable future, urging the simultaneous pursuit of ecological and decolonial (and thus anticapitalist) work in tandem. Through the lenses of these artists, the Caribbean emerges not just as a region to be studied, but as a source of profound insight for global movements.
Minia Biabiany, Toli Toli
Toli Toli uses the spatial metaphor of an old children’s song to evoke a politically intertwined narrative of Guadeloupean territory. In the poem-video, the “toli toli” —meaning “chrysalid of a butterfly” in Guadeloupean Créole— shows directions toward an inner elsewhere, mapping places and distances shaped by the presence of coloniality. As the landscape’s story unfolds, two hands repeatedly weave with an invisible thread, echoing the technique of bamboo weaving as a structural metaphor for language. Both the song and the bamboo weaving technique — once used to make fish traps —have almost disappeared from Guadeloupean culture/knowledge.
Ayesha Hameed, Black Atlantis: the Plantationocene
Black Atlantis: the Plantationocene is the documentation of a live audio-visual essay, or live PowerPoint cinema. It asks: what is the relationship between climate change and plantation economies, and how might we begin to think of a watery Plantationocene? It revolves around two islands: a former plantation in St George’s Parish in Barbados, and the port city of Port of Spain in Trinidad: visiting the heartland of one of the three stops of the triangular trade, and taking seriously Donna Haraway’s and Anna Tsing’s use of the term ‘Plantationocene’ which connects the development of a plantation form of production to the beginning of the current geological era that we are in.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Celaje
Celaje (Cloudscape) explores the confluence of recent natural disasters with Puerto Rico’s colonial histories and present. Combining home movies, footage and sound recordings of the artist’s late grandmother, and footage from post-Hurricane Maria and COVID-19 era Puerto Rico, Muriente sees the work as an elegy. She emphasises the theme of impermanence by degrading some of the film stock, an analogy for the ravages of the tropical climate on the material evidence of history.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Ojos para mis enemigos
Ojos para mis enemigos explores the interplay between introduced and indigenous species—plants, crops, animals, and humans—within a shared landscape. It examines how these varied presences collectively shape a new space, offering both poetic and tangible reflections on the Anthropocene. The work confronts its devastations while also revealing possibilities for recuperation and resilience.
Hope Strickland, If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever)
Cotton: the very crop for which creole women were forced into labour, also offered a form of herbal resistance. Through carefully gathered and held knowledge, women used it to defy a lineage of servitude. Beneath the inherent violence of the slave economic system, we find quiet resistance and moments of deep, loving rebellion.
Artist Bios
Minia Biabiany (Guadeloupe, 1988) works and lives in Guadeloupe. In her practice Biabiany observes how the perception of the body is entangled with the perception of space, land and History. She explores the possibility of an enunciation out of the dominant colonial storytelling particularly in the context of Guadeloupe and the consequences of the French assimilation in the relations between the people the land and the plants. She initiated the artistic and pedagogical collective project semillero Caribe in 2016 in Mexico City and continues to explore the deconstruction of narratives with the sensations of the body and concepts from Caribbean authors with the experimental platform Doukou. She studied in the Fine Art school ENSBA Lyon in France. Her work has been shown in the Xth Biennale de Berlin, TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica, Witte de Wite in Rotterdam, Cràter Invertido in Mexico, Prix Sc Po 2019 in Paris, SIGNAL in Malmö. Last year she had a solo show in the Palais de Tokyo in fall 2022 and her first multilingual monograph Ritmo Volcan came out at the Edition house Temblores.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a visual artist whose practice claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her work employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications. She has been a fellow of the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, Smithsonian Institute and Puerto Rican Arts Initiative. Her work has been shown recently in Documenta Fifteen, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Proxyco Gallery, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and El Kilómetro. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local in San Juan. She was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship in 2023 and the United States Artist Fellowship in 2024
Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. She currently teaches on the MFA in Art at Goldsmiths University of London, is a Kone Foundation Research Fellow and Artist in Residence at the Camden Arts Centre and is Professor of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist who works primarily through the expanded moving image. She works with a camera because it is a device that is particularly attuned to the improvisational and aesthetic intelligence that is already at work in the world. Her films and videos are populated by actores naturales and developed through her writing, structured improvisation, and at times, chance operations. Her recent work is focused on simultaneous narration, the anti-colonial unconscious, and the subjective experience of disorder. Recent solo exhibitions include: Ottilia at Crac-Alsace, Oriana in PIVO, Sao Paulo and Argos in Brussels. Her work is part of public and private collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Kadist and Guggenheim, among others. She has received a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the 2021 Artes Mundi Prize(which was shared among all 7 nominees), and a CARA Fellowship.
Hope Pearl Strickland is an artist, filmmaker and researcher from Manchester, UK with British-Jamaican heritage. Her work sits at the intersection of experimental film and documentary practices, moving across archival, analogue and digital formats in order to quietly sit across from and outside of time. Her practice wrestles with violence, disparate colonial landscapes and attempts to ask how we might live in a world and relate to one another with care whilst amongst and against systems of power and control. Hope’s work has screened internationally at film festivals including the 59th New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival.
Curated by Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes
