Alberta Whittle

Abstract Scottish-Barbadian artist Alberta Whittle continues to develop a rich, urgent, and far-ranging creative practice that combines elements of installation, film, sculpture, written word, and performance. Her work is preoccupied with the reverberating afterlives of slavery and colonialism, with our relationship to the natural world and to the imminence of environmental catastrophe, with the dynamics of kinship and intergenerational testimony, and with the radical possibilities that reside in expressions of care and compassion, for self and others. This article considers a recent digital video work by Whittle, between a whisper and a cry (2019). In her video, Whittle approaches the shifting waters of the Atlantic Ocean in part as a fluid repository or archive for the traumas of the Middle Passage. Responding particularly to influential critical formulations found in the work of Christina Sharpe, Whittle also explores how the wake left behind by such violent histories continues to buffet the Caribbean, exposing the region and those who live there disproportionately to the intensifying effects of extreme weather. Against a backdrop of accelerating ecological crisis, Whittle's work urges us to consider a worsening climate in which forms of antiblackness flow from past to present to uncertain future, but, crucially, she also asks how this storm might potentially be weathered.