STUDIOS
CaribLab Research + Design initiatives
CaribLab Studios bring different forms of expertise and practice into relation through a shared Caribbean problem.
A Studio begins from the premise that the questions confronting Caribbean life cannot be adequately worked through within a single discipline or medium. Climate catastrophe, infrastructure, land development, ecological transformation, tourism, property, agriculture, cultural production, and changing forms of investment operate together even when the forms of knowledge used to understand them remain institutionally separate.
The Studio creates a structure in which researchers, designers, artists, and practitioners can share a landscape or problem without requiring them to share a method. Planning, landscape architecture, geography, ecology, architecture, political economy, history, visual art, performance, sound, film, and other forms of cultural practice may approach a question differently. The conditions of the problem force those forms of expertise into relation.
WORKING ACROSS FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE
A question about rebuilding after a hurricane, for example, moves through the physical systems directing water, the infrastructure through which communities receive energy and access, the ecological processes through which damaged landscapes regenerate, the political economy determining where investment flows, and the property relations that determine who can remain on the land as its value changes.
It may also move through memory, ritual, performance, visual culture, and the forms through which people interpret loss, continuity, and belonging.
No single account is sufficient because decisions made in one field alter the conditions confronting the others.
METHODS
FIELDWORK — Site observation, interviews, field documentation, and engagement with the material conditions of a place.
MAPPING — Spatial analysis, cartography, territorial relationships, movement, infrastructure, land use, and environmental systems.
ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS — Water, soils, vegetation, climate, ecological processes, vulnerability, and landscape change.
HISTORICAL RESEARCH — Archives, oral histories, property histories, memory, and the longer processes through which contemporary landscapes have been produced.
INSTITUTIONAL INQUIRY — The organizations, policies, financial systems, public agencies, and social relationships through which development becomes possible.
DRAWING + MODELING — Visual and spatial propositions used to understand relationships, compare alternatives, and make possible futures legible.
SCENARIO BUILDING — Alternative arrangements that allow different consequences, costs, risks, and possibilities to be compared before decisions become fixed.
PROTOTYPING — Material experiments through which propositions can be tested through use, performance, maintenance, and adaptation.
CULTURAL PRACTICE — Performance, installation, image-making, sound, film, publication, and other forms through which histories, attachments, contradictions, and possibilities can be investigated.
These methods are not predetermined requirements. Different Studios will assemble the forms of inquiry and practice appropriate to the problem being worked.
DESIGN AS INQUIRY
Design and cultural practice are consequential to CaribLab as modes of inquiry.
A road that functions under ordinary conditions but cannot endure a hurricane cannot sustain the life organized around it. Infrastructure investment may expand economic possibility while changing surrounding land values and patterns of ownership.
An artwork, performance, or cultural intervention may make perceptible histories, attachments, contradictions, and possibilities that technical analysis alone cannot reveal.
Studios create space to work through these relationships before they are reduced to a single solution.
COLLABORATION
At CaribLab Studios, the problem determines the collaboration.
A Studio begins with a Caribbean condition that requires different forms of knowledge and practice to work together.
CaribLab may convene collaborations among researchers, designers, artists, practitioners, students, institutions, and other forms of expertise when their work can contribute meaningfully to the problem under investigation.
STUDIOS / IN DEVELOPMENT
Future CaribLab Studios will be published here as they take form.