From November 2017-January 2018, I attended an artist residency with the Leipzig International Artist programme in Leipzig, Germany. During my time in Leipzig, I created new drawings. These works were made with liquid graphite and acrylic placed on paper and acetate cut-out forms. The drawings were placed on wallpaper I collected from hardware stores in Leipzig. The cut-out forms in the paintings are arranged upwards and turn into hybrid creatures and combineaspects of tropical plants, human faces, and human appendages.

The drawings were inspired by a narrative I became aware of while living in Leipzig. I learned that during the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990) many contract workers from Cuba, historically referred to as gastarbeiter ( meaning “guest worker”), were brought to Leipzig to fulfill temporary work placements within factories and other industries. TheCuban contract workers were brought to Germany as part of a trade agreement between the GDR and Cuba. This agreement assigned Cuban contract workers to live and work within German factories, like the Spinnerei, for fixed salaries, and they were discouraged from intermixing with the German public. After the trade agreement was removed, the Cuban contract workers were uprooted from their locations in Germany and sent back to Cuba. I was concerned with the negative outlook of this narrative. The act of diaspora created from the design of contract workers caused the Cuban people to be bartered into unfamiliar locations like trading goods. I felt that this act was a result of a very complex social order in GDR and I wanted to address the previous existence of these contract workers within the historic Spinnerei complex. Therefore, I attempted to address the existence of these workers by drawing multiple hybrid creatures that were placed on the wall of the Spinnerie complex and combined to make a tropical mural.

My mural responded to the contract worker narrative by using hybrid, tropical creatures (inspired by the works of Wilfredo Lam) to challenge the industrial format of the Spinnerie and turn it into a tropical space. The creatures were also made to be portable drawings that could travel after their initial presentation in Leipzig. I designed the drawings to disassemble into various parts and travel lightly within a 61x77x15cm crate. The tropical forms are adaptable and have shifted in their orientation when reassembled in new locations. The temporary manner of the creatures allows them to make a tropical mural that displays a unique presence, yet it is not fixed to any one location. Instead, they were designed to be portable and are defined by their transportation. The portability and temporary state of the creatures make them similar to the designed roles of the Cuban contract workers whose presence they represent.

The Tropical Forms were later redesigned for the Arrivants Exhibition which was featured at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society in Bridge Town, Barbados in November 2018, and for the Tropical Visions exhibition at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in June 2019. I also adapted the aesthetics from the Tropical Forms into a digital collage project that I titled "See Your Travel Agent" and they were used for the Toof Prints public art project curated by Kriston Chen in Oranjestad, Aruba in August 2018.

I recognize that the idea behind the Tropical Forms has evolved from the specific narrative of the Cuban contract workers, and I now attempt to promote discussion about migration caused by political matters and how such movement encourages sexual encounters and coupling between different cultural groups. I also realize that migration is historically recognized by both positive and negative circumstances, but I feel that hybridizing and cross-cultural marriages should be embraced.