Principal Investigator: Andil Gosine.

Funding: SSHRC Connections Grant.

Term: 2020-2022.

"Everything Slackens In A Wreck" is a line from Khal Torabully's "Coolitude" which expresses Indentures' experience of rebuilding and reinventing their lives during the period of indentureship. Trapped in the dehumanizing conditions of the Indentureship program, migrants nevertheless also simultaneously worked against tenets of caste and gender that had been punishing to them in South Asia. Indo-Caribbean women, for example, found ways to assert new forms of economic, political and sexual autonomy that would endure to the present. Possibilities always open up in the fissures created by crisis, and the framework of this exhibition bears broader relevance, as evidenced in 2020 by the myriad responses to the pandemic and the stunning force of the Black Lives Matter movement; however bad things get, the human spirit and our survivalist drive force new shifts and invent new paths. Torabully's phrase is understood in this project as an observation more than aspiration---an acceptance of Michel Foucault's contention that resistance is an always present counterpart to power. This project records and weighs the mechanics of what slackens in a wreck---and optimistically imagines what comes after. This new project will include an exhibition at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York in 2021