During the spring of 2024, I visited Dominica for the first time in my life. This was a trip and a body of work I had long endeavoured to create; however I simply did not have the capacity to commit to, being ensnared in the everyday happenings of life in London. Nevertheless, having the opportunity to commit myself to an autoethnographic practice-based geography project taking place in Dominica, I turned my lens towards the aims of framing ideas of home, heritage and belonging. By ‘autoethnographic practice-based geography’, what I really mean to say is that I situated my personal experiences, observations and perceptions of visiting Dominica at the heart of this geographic project. The practice-based aspect of this project lies with me using audio-visual art activities in photography, film and soundscapes, to support my observations. This body of work can be read as a positioning of myself as a Black British and Dominican subject caught between islands, an individual whose home lies both with the imperial metropole of London and the verdant green, beautiful gardens and savannahs of Dominica.
Black Geographies of Kings Hill, Dominica, is a project I had initiated upon my first visit to Dominica. I wrote approximately 27,000 words of reflective fieldnotes, made a series of analogue photographs, montage film clips and soundscapes, thereby situating these activities as forms of Black creativity that underscored my framings of Kings Hill Dominica. As a Black British individual of Dominican descent, this project was more akin to ‘heartwork’ and or ‘homework’ than it was fieldwork in the ‘traditional’ sense. The audio-visual activities I took up, were all advanced as artistic practices oriented to making genuine connections with Domnica’s people and places, whilst depicting the beauty of Domnica’s poetic landscapes.
This body of work can be read as a positioning of myself as a Black British and Dominican subject caught between islands, an individual whose home lies both with the imperial metropole of London and the verdant green, beautiful gardens and savannahs of Dominica.
I purposefully chose to position myself as the subject of my practice-based geographic research and audio-visual art activities, as opposed to hastily making superficial connections with Dominica’s people on my first visit. By doing so, I genuinely believe that photographing people on my initial visit to Dominica would have led to my enabling and engaging in extractive processes of knowledge production. In light of this moral and ethical dilemma, I chose not to photograph Dominica’s people unless they explicitly requested this, or it was a photograph taking place in a public setting, and I was informed that it was appropriate for me to do so. This kind of slow and more considerate audio-visual arts practice allowed me to enact a politics of refusal in my research and artistic activities taken up in Dominica, a politics which actively resists neoliberal capitalist means of producing knowledge.
Finally, it is by sharing a series of photographs and handwritten reflections in this photo-essay that I hope to demonstrate that knowledge pertaining to geographic locales exists in a myriad of forms. Thus it is, in viewing snapshots of these Kings Hill Dominica and beyond, that I hope this photo-essay encourages readers to reflect on their own everyday notions of home, heritage and belonging.
The following reflections were handwritten and transcribed during my first visit to Dominica. These reflections share my ideas of home, heritage and belonging.
[03/04/2024] I come from a council estate in North West London, called St.RAPHAEL’S hence my artist name St.Peso. Perhaps in another reality, I was born and raised in Roseau in Kings Hill where I then became a kings hill boy. This idea of originally coming from a Kings Hill intrigues me as it expands my global Black Geographies beyond city based experiences. In Kings Hill I’m being situated a lot more closer to nature.
[08/04/2024] This embodied experience of returning “home”. Or going to my mother’s and grandmother’s home. This idea I have of belonging to a place I’ve never been up until now and yet almost immediately being capable of reckoning with the facts of my situation. All of it, today my thoughts and feelings, my grounded experiences of stepping of the plane and walking around a small yet deep section of Kings Hill. It’s everything I anticipated, but at the same time could not be further from what I expected I would feel. These ARE my geographies.
[16/04/2024] I spent the entire day on Kings Hill visiting and spending time with family who’ve also come to visit Dominica. This family previously lived on the island, so it’s something of a grand return. There are grandparents, parents and children, so there generations in all who have here for a wedding.
[17/04/2024] How can the fieldwork be the “field” for one when this is the place my ancestors where taken to through the advancement of the transatlantic slave trade. My existence and positionality have come about through a synthesis of Dominica’s and the U.K’s histories or more generally/widely the histories of the Caribbean. I am potentially my ancestors wildest dreams or their wildest nightmares.
[23/04/2024] My heritage lays with these natural kinds of places in Dominica just as much as it lays with the kinship/people who called the island home before I came into this world. I’m now discovering the idea of how heritage can extend beyond the notion of people onto the notion/idea of place.