Isabel Flower
The two of you are the cocreators of Sucking Salt—a project that focuses on archiving Caribbean architecture and aesthetics for continued research. I’d like to begin with each of you sharing an early memory of or experience with Caribbean architecture—something that you look at in retrospect as influential or formative. It could be a place, an object, or even a detail.

Zenobia
My first formative experience with Caribbean architecture was visiting my grandparents' house on the South Side of Chicago when I was 12 years old. My grandparents are both immigrants from Jamaica and they had this beautiful brownstone that was built mostly from mahogany. It was very grand and had a distinctly West Indian sentiment to its interiors and decor. It was very impactful for me to see how they dealt with their living space.

Another experience in the Caribbean itself was in early 2020, when I went on a trip to a very small island in The Bahamas called Cat Island. You can only take a little seaplane to get there. I went with my mother and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich to stay with Tamika Galanis, a Bahamian artist and filmmaker now based in New York who was living and working on Cat Island at the time and did a lot of research there. We were driving and I asked Tamika to stop at a roundabout where we passed this strange monument—it looked like a concrete obelisk that had been painted white and flattened with this half cut out hole, almost like a bite had been taken out. It made me think about Sucking Salt à la Meredith Gadsby’s proverb—taking in and then spitting out oppression. Alongside it was this little pink staircase. Tamika told me it’s a Masonic monument and that the staircase is meant to lead to another dimension. This later became a motif that I explored in some artworks that I made. I became really invested in the level of creativity and articulation in how people deal with their lived environment.

Shani Strand
I also have two recollections, one diasporic and the other in Jamaica. The first thing that comes to mind also has to do with interior spaces. I grew up with a living room that was not for use. I remember falling asleep on the couch and my mom flipping out like, "Don't you have a bed?” I grew up in one of those homes with lace curtains, a floral patterned couch, mahogany furniture, and doilies on everything—but again, not for use.

I also spent a lot of time in Far Rockaway as a kid. My mom used to live there and my dad also worked there as a minister. My grandma would come up from Jamaica and spend time at this house where my mom’s brother still lives with my cousins. That living room also had what I thought was my family’s aesthetic—again, the lace curtains, the certain pattern on the couch, the mahogany, the doilies. (I still have doilies on everything.) I think the Black diaspora living room has a special role. My mom had a cover made for the couch that was the exact same pattern as the couch and I didn’t realise it wasn’t the actual couch for years. I grew up with a lot of other West Indian people—Trinidadians, Dominicans, other Jamaicans. I’m hanging out with friends and going to their houses for the first time and then I’m like, “Wait…everyone’s immigrant parents have the same living room?” The realisation that this was a communal and cultural aesthetic, not my family’s personal one, even if it is both, was also a pivotal moment for me.

Then, when I would go to Jamaica and spend time with family, I started to become more attentive to architecture and visual culture. This was also around when I was coming into the decision to pursue art with my own life. I spend my time in Westmoreland, which is a city in the countryside. It was very impactful to think about the non-distinction between art and daily experience: the street signs, posters, and advertisements; the way the bus stop is painted; the breeze block designs within the bus stop. I would go to the cemetery where my grandfather is buried to drop off flowers and the aesthetics of that place were impactful as well. These experiences became the basis for my art practice—the lack of a real border between art and the ways that we aestheticize all aspects of life. It's so important to me that art is something that is not removed from the simple ways we relate to and navigate the world, even its mundanity.

IF
It’s lovely that the two of you share these synchronicities. How did Sucking Salt as a partnership begin? What about this subject matter gave you the urgency to create a project around it?

SS
I think both of our art practices are also related to this question. I think that, through understanding one’s own identity in relationship to this community, or the diasporic version of this community, one is able to begin to understand oneself and one’s tastes and preferences. I didn't just fall out of a coconut tree [laughs]. Where do my sensibilities come from? There’s a way of coming to understand oneself through aesthetic sensibilities and discretions that felt, for me at least, very grounding. Being part of a diaspora can be very slippery as there are always these inherent colonial hierarchies, and one has to be careful not to superimpose the diaspora over or above the fact that the Caribbean West Indies are places that are actively lived in and contemporary. A critique of diaspora thinking is the way it creates historicization and turns places into diasporic memory. For me, as a diaspora baby, I want and need to put in the effort to actively engage in the place and to form my own community in relation to it. I think Sucking Salt is a site for reflection, research, and consideration, but also for active work around studying and participating in culture.

Z
Sucking Salt is partially a passion project that came out of the COVID lockdown. We were already spending so much time inside on our phones. We asked ourselves, "What is something that we feel devoted to and interested in that also engages and excites us?" Shani has a much closer relationship to Jamaica than I do and spends time there every year, so she’s been absorbing the aesthetics of these places over a long time.

Right before lockdown, I took a trip to Martinique to support Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich on research for her film, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, and I was moved even further by the architecture I experienced on that trip. Like Shani, I have also been affected by the dedication to aesthetics presented in Caribbean cemeteries, especially also on my trip to the Bahamas. I started taking a lot of pictures so that I could better understand or locate the vernacular architectures in the places I was in.

Shani suggested the idea first and, in the beginning, our friend, Alyssa, who had spent a year living in Martinique, was part of the project as well. Referentially, we’re the type of people who become interested in something and want to extrapolate from it forever. You’re never finished piecing things together. We were thinking about a lack and looking into how Caribbean architecture has or has not been historized. In terms of diaspora, it’s not an indebtedness to a culture, but rather a commitment to it and a form of care. It’s saying—this is of importance; this is of value.

SS
We’re all looking for ourselves in the world and looking for things we can relate to. When we don’t find them, can we then produce the space for those things? I used to shit post a lot of aesthetic references on my Finsta—really mundane things like the iron work on a window or an altar on someone’s stoop. Through any kind of documentation, you eventually relate your sensibilities to a larger practice. Instagram felt easier than programming a WordPress at the time.

IF
That was your first archive.

Z
When it all started, we gathered our collections of images and made our own Instagram. And then we did a little Instagram Live where we talked about Caribbean architecture and it just went from there.

IF
I want to clarify what we mean when we use the word “vernacular” in reference to architecture. I think it's a divisive and somewhat outdated term. Depending on the context, it can also be presented as offensive. I think what we mean is something that is both designed and built by the people who are actually using or living in it, in the way that they want and with the materials that they have. This is also now called “popular” architecture.

Z
I agree, and I would add that because it's built by the people who use it, it already exists outside the Western architectural canon.

SS
What if we relate the vernacular to something oppositional? If Architecture—with a capital A—is removed from the people you mention, then vernacular architecture has an intimacy with them. I’ve been thinking a lot about how generally dismissive people are about the function of aesthetics, because we think that design has to be the result of functional or structural engineering. For me, the “vernacular” centres the function of aesthetics because of that very intimacy.

Z
I think that the ability to exist outside of the modernist priority of form as function creates a certain type of agency for a person, and that’s their vernacular.

IF
Zenobia, you brought up the lack of historiography around Caribbean architecture. Of course, there is some documented history, there are books and there is critical writing, but it is mostly separate from the pedagogy of Architecture.

Z
I would also add that we’ve found a big disparity between how African architecture and Caribbean architecture are addressed.

SS
In general, when people talk about tropical architecture, and especially tropical modernism, they are referring to a school of thought that comes from Nigeria and that particular legacy of British colonialism. I’ve definitely stolen ways of thinking about Caribbean architecture from writers who are considering Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America—a lot of nationalist movements and a lot of socialist architecture in tropical places.

IF
Though architectural history is limited in its canon, and historically dismissive of practices or traditions that were considered "vernacular,” the absence offers an opportunity for these stories to be written. Have you considered what you’d like to contribute to the discourse around what Caribbean architecture is? Or even simply to its visibility?

SS
I want to reach people and build community. I want people to be curious. How do we bring attention and value to something that people can then also extrapolate on within their own lives? When attention is brought to something, when people ascribe value to something, that changes the lenses through which they approach their own environments, heritages, and knowledge sources. It’s about introducing different lenses, and then shifting the lenses that people are willing to put on.

I remember, when we first started the Instagram, a friend reached out and said they’d shared it with their West Indian parent who had said, "What's Caribbean architecture? The Caribbean doesn't have an architecture. Its architecture is European. It’s parts of other people's architectural styles placed in the Caribbean." I was like, "I understand why you feel that way, but I'm also so sorry you feel that way, and I’m hopeful that you could change your mind." I think what I’m saying is—we’re throwing things out in the world and hoping they stick and stay in people in some way.

Z
I agree that we want to give people a chance to potentially shift their value systems. But, also, on a more superficial level, I also just want you to experience what I’m experiencing.

SS
Right, because isn't this beautiful?

Z
Isn’t this gorgeous? You didn't know about it, and I want you to also know. Through Sucking Salt, we're also interested in creating specific education around, for example, the history and uses of certain materials. We made a video for PIN-UP about concrete. We've talked about making another video essay focusing on mahogany, which is a motif that we both intimately experienced in our family homes.

SS
Like Isabel said, it's not that there isn't scholarship around Caribbean architecture. It’s more that our approach is outside of the typical methodologies for this kind of work. As artists, we are not restricted by or even trained in those methodologies. We don’t feel the need to think about lived environments or buildings in a specific way.

Z
There is a part of our work that traces how modernism happens in the Caribbean—looking at Georgian architecture, for example, or Gingerbread houses. That part is important, of course. But to echo what Shani said, we’re both artists so we’re looking in a more sensory way.

SS
We’re also interested in new methodologies. It’s always complicated to make something archival in relation to a community. It has to do with relationships between communities and the ideas of monoliths. There will always be disagreements, differences of perspective, and biases within the community. There's a history of being a colonised people, or there’s a history of being first-gen. People are going to have very different ways of relating to that history and of either challenging or recreating its infrastructures. To echo what Zenobia said before, you are not indebted to a culture by birth or by fellowship. And when you are actively participating in that culture, you are also not required to ascribe to it. You can actively participate and still have agency.

When we first started Sucking Salt, I was really into Pan-Caribbean aesthetics, which was informed by having grown up with people from different West Indian and Caribbean backgrounds. Many of the countries in the Caribbean were colonised multiple times. There are influences from Spain, Britain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. Saint Martin is still half Dutch, half French to this day. These colonial traces are highly contested, but they are also embodied by the people who live through and within their realities. If you feel that the Caribbean has no architecture of its own, what do you call something that’s been eaten then spit back out? What is it, once you’ve chewed it and spit it back?

Z
The idea of the Pan-Caribbean is also complicated by the Caribbean being a group of islands; though there are many points of connection there is also a physical separation, and incredible diversity for that reason.

SS
Yet another point of colonial connection is that the entire region's development is based on tourism. That, too, deeply affects people's idea (both people of Caribbean descent and those visiting) of these islands as actual places where people live and make things, as opposed to temporary sites for temporary people to experience imported versions of paradise or luxury.

IF
Architecture is always a map of other things—of incentives, priorities, hierarchies, expectations, and desires. In other words, Architecture is a map of other architectures. Shani, you’ve said beautifully that Sucking Salt is “less about tracing Caribbean architecture and more about how Caribbean architecture becomes traces of other things." What are some of the things this work has revealed the contours of?

SS
There are many different entry points to what's being revealed. I have a friend who's from Ghana and recently we were talking about how much Jamaican Patois is Twi. For example, the word “duppy” is Twi, so even different creoles are traces. Visually speaking, in my personal art practice I’ve been working with spider web grilles. My next-door neighbour in Jamaica has spider web grilles on their windows, and to my knowledge they’re quite common in Jamaica, though I haven’t really seen them in other Caribbean countries.

I have no primary or secondary source backing this exact connection, but I do know that a large percentage of people who were brought to Jamaica from West Africa were Akan people from modern-day Ghana. I also know that the spider tale of Anansi is an Ashanti Akan tale. I have wondered if the prominence of this grille work is connected to that story, because the spider web is not part of the Adinkra system, while other motifs like Sankofa are. Those are the kinds of extrapolations I’m making.

Then, on the other hand, I’m also thinking about capital, and moments in a country’s history when more capital means that big national infrastructural and architectural projects happen, and how they align with global politics. We mentioned that we want to make a video about mahogany, which has a rich history related to European colonisation because of its value in Baroque and Rococo era furniture. West Indian mahogany was mostly found in the Greater Antilles like South Florida, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. It was almost made extinct due to the great value ascribed to it as an exotic wood. Now West Indian mahogany is mostly farmed in Fiji [laughs] but furniture made from it is still an economic and cultural status symbol in the Caribbean because of the Caribbean’s colonial history.

Z
I'm thinking about the mahogany china cabinets in my grandmother's home, as well as the homes of family members who I’ve visited in Jamaica, and this specific furnishing made from this specific material being another colonial influence. We’re tracing how such influences manifest and vary between different vernaculars, even in something like breeze blocks. This also means considering how people live in harsh weather conditions, and how the architecture and visual culture responds to that. There’s so much cross combination and, as a result, so many traces to make meaning of.

SS
I remember finding out that breeze blocks were attributed to Corbusier, and I was like...what? All of these cross combinations in architectural styles come from the movement of people. Take traditions out of Trinidad or Guyana, where whole populations were brought from India as indentured servants, or even regional differences in a place like Haiti, where there is a small Polish population. There are small pockets of Chinese Jamaicans and of Germanic Jamaicans, especially in the South. All these migration histories affect the diversity of architecture, as well as religion and the prominence of religious architectures.

IF
Again, in terms of thinking about historiography, so much of traditional history-making revolves around authorship and attribution. But when you look into cross-cultural pollination, it can become difficult to assign authorship. I think that to really study interculturality, you have to let go of the desire for neat and tidy beginnings and endings. To me, your work offers a way of thinking about history that is more plural and open to nuance.

Z
We could go on forever looking just at the variety in churches, synagogues, and mosques in the Caribbean.

SS
Did you know that Jamaica has more churches per square mile than any other country in the world? Sylvia Wynter has an amazing essay about it called “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality, and the Caribbean Rethinking Modernity.”

IF
To be the keeper of an archive also comes with responsibility, as archives are so often expressions of authority and governance. How do you hope to manage your role as stewards, and to resist or upend the archive's colonial legacy?

SS
It’s hard, because there is the fact that archives operate with “authority and governance,” and then there is the feeling of being a person doing archival work and driven first and foremost by curiosity and a desire to share, and maybe the understanding that by creating an archive on a public platform, it can then also be engaged with via comments or DMs. As we develop different ways of interfacing and programming, the authoritative voice may be assumed more, but I am imagining an interface that is open-source. Above all, I hope that Sucking Salt always feels like it is giving people options for thinking about the world, or opening up alternatives, more than it feels like it’s feeding new information into the systems of Architecture and Archives. I don’t know that it’s possible to fully upend the archive’s colonial legacy and so the job is then to resist and critique it. One role of the project is simply pointing out all of the holes in the colonial archive and calling attention to the ways in which archives are ideologically constructed, and do their own ideological performing of history and objectivity.

Z
I think of my and Sucking Salt's relationship to the archive as one of adding where there is a lack, rather than taking a position of authority. In the same vein as looking at vernacular architecture as oppositional to Architecture, I think there is room for new definitions of how archives can exist in relation to dynamics of power. The definition of an archive is simply, “a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people.” I think we intend to add information rather than to define the Caribbean as a place, as history is always moving and being made rapidly, in real time, and with fluidity. Considerations around sharing resources and giving credit to contributors are important. We are ultimately looking to engage within our communities—to give and to receive.

Shani Strand is an artist, writer, and half of Sucking Salt. Through her work, Strand considers ungovernability in post-colonialism. She explores the unstable intersections between contemporary diasporic culture and historical narratives, between systems of violence and the administration of individual freedom. Strand has recently exhibited in SLIPPERY 4L (Harkawik, Los Angeles); Procession (Rachel Uffner, New York); A Walk Good, Act Bad (Deli, Mexico City). She has performed with Miho Hatori at The Broad (Los Angeles, 2022) and has been published by CARLA (2024), The Avery Review (2023) and Pin-Up Magazine (2021). She has lectured at Wesleyan University (2024) and Harvard Graduate School of Design (2022).

Zenobia is an artist and half of Sucking Salt. She uses material to construct sculptures that examine interiority, agency, and refusal. This is done through critical explorations of social and enduring colonial histories that center the Caribbean and its diaspora. Zenobia’s work is informed by personal narratives and those of objects and symbols. Sculpting is veiling and veiling is sculpting, right? Zenobia had recently exhibited at Sanctuary (Deli Gallery, New York); Ballast: Recent Aesthetic Practices in Response to Anti-Blackness (Culver Center of the Arts, Riverside, CA); Extra Terrestrial (Rachel Uffner, New York). Zenobia has been published in Pin-Up Magazine (2021) and lectured at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2022). She lives and works between Los Angeles and New York.