We Love We Self Up Here
Year Completed: 2021
Kannan Arunasalam, Director
Tao DuFour and Natalie Melas, Producers
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We Love We Self Up Here is a documentary short that explores narratives of lived experiences of urban, agricultural, and industrial landscapes tied to colonial and postcolonial legacies of sugar production and hydrocarbon extraction in Trinidad & Tobago. The film captures complex histories of labor and migration through the intimate stories of a few persons. The spaces of narration—domestic, neighborhood, and landscape—themselves emerge as “characters,” architectural and landscape witnesses to long processes of social and environmental change. The history of architecture in the Caribbean is inseparable from that of the parallel development of capitalism, slavery, and indentured servitude. These emerged through the appropriation and design of the landscape itself, as a function of colonial capitalist modernity’s extractive regime with its highly profitable re-invention of the racial division of labor in the plantation system, and the indigenous genocide and coerced migration of peoples it entailed. It is in the face of this haunting background that the first generation of post- or de-colonial thinkers took it as one of their tasks to make this landscape possible—in literature, philosophy and the arts—as a space of embodied lived experience.
We Love We Self Up Here offers narrative insight into this sedimented history in the way that it, to quote Édouard Glissant, “still reverberates to this day” in the lived spatial experiences of the landscapes of the people of the Caribbean. The film has been screened at Cornell AAP, Harvard GSD, and the Department of Architecture at Cambridge University, UK.