Sotavento

Olga Gabrielle often starts the concept of her works from dreams. In Sotavento the artist presents the landscape as a fragment of reality and reveals its condition as a cultural construction. The work references the changes to the Caribbean landscape as a result of the colonization of the land. These changes caused by occupational interventions to the land also disrupted these people’s self-perceptions of identity.

The title of the work is borrowed from the nautical term for the direction of the winds. It was by this flow that the wind was complicit in facilitating the displacement of ships during the period of colonialism. The artist engages with the landscape, by inserting herself receptively to connect with the physical, imaginative, and spiritual inner flows it provides. A return to nature as a need for individual and social refoundation. An act of resistance.