GROUNDINGS
gathering in the first and last act of repair
The term draws deliberately from a Caribbean intellectual tradition of encounter, exchange, and engagement with the material conditions of everyday life. A Grounding is a momentary formation of that longer tradition, through which a question can be worked collectively. It is a practice of what Rastafari call reasoning, a mode of gathering in which thought is produced through sustained exchange rather than presented as already complete.
For CaribLab, this makes the Grounding more than a workshop or symposium, the delivery of papers intended primarily as a public event. It is a relational forms of knowledge-practice and experience brought into relation around a shared commitment.
This working form of collective inquiry brings together farmers, artists, researchers, designers, and ecologists to address concrete Caribbean problems. We reason on the material possibilities of Caribbean landscapes, focusing on ecological restitution and the redesign of institutional frameworks under climate vulnerability.
GROUNDING 01
CARIBLAB × KENYATTA
SUMMER 2027 / KENYATTA FARMS, JAMAICA
WHAT CAN CARIBBEAN LAND REPAIR?
“I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of Black people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because, that is Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the Brothers say. We have to ‘ground together’.”
— Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers