Bi-weekly March 19 - May 28, 2024
Offering an enhanced public recognition of the Caribbean Diaspora, The Bata Project explores the tradition of house dresses worn in the Caribbean, mainly by women at “home” through community engagements incorporating aesthetics that honors folklore in the urban landscape. By infusing a contemporary lens into intimate memories via community exchange, this project offers a generative hybridity, intergenerational connections, merging of contemporary and fashion history with urban folklore, bringing oral histories, visual art and performance into the public commons.
I invite peers and community members of all ages, genders to participate and wear their batas to join in the interdisciplinary discourse of this project via visual art, storytelling, music, and sharing of folklore. Gatherings occur through a series of public events which highlight this house dress and creates interconnections with fashion and fusion of the isla/urban communities. With multiple creative access points, this project offers agency to multiple community members and artists as well as the general public.
In this process of togetherness and community building, the focus is on the energy of the group that gathers, and the group grows organically through word of mouth as previous participants invite their friends and family members to join them at the next public gathering. This togetherness supports invitations to the public to join in the conversation and share stories.
As The Bata Project unfolds, we will witness how this dress - worn outside in the public eye - subverts social expectations and celebrates the power of home and stories connected with home, care, the body, and history as something you bring with you everywhere.
These gatherings include photo sessions and video documentation of public sharings.